Generalized differential morphological profiles for remote sensing image classification

Differential morphological profiles (DMPs) are widely used for the spatial/structural feature extraction and classification of remote sensing images. They can be regarded as the shape spectrum, depicting the response of the image structures related to different scales and sizes of the structural elements (SEs). DMPs are defined as the difference of morphological profiles (MPs) between consecutive scales. However, traditional DMPs can ignore discriminative information for features that are across the scales in the profiles. To solve this problem, we propose scale-span differential profiles, i.e., generalized DMPs (GDMPs), to obtain the entire differential profiles. GDMPs can describe the complete shape spectrum and measure the difference between arbitrary scales, which is more appropriate for representing the multiscale characteristics and complex landscapes of remote sensing image scenes. Subsequently, the random forest (RF) classifier is applied to interpret GDMPs considering its robustness for high-dimensional data and ability of evaluating the importance of variables. Meanwhile, the RF "out-of-bag" error can be used to quantify the importance of each channel of GDMPs and select the most discriminative information in the entire profiles. Experiments conducted on three well-known hyperspectral data sets as well as an additional World View-2 data are used to validate the effectiveness of GDMPs compared to the traditional DMPs. The results are promising as GDMPs can significantly outperform the traditional one, as it is capable of adequately exploring the multiscale morphological information

Multi-Channel Morphological Profiles for Classification of Hyperspectral Images Using Support Vector Machines

Hyperspectral imaging is a new remote sensing technique that generates hundreds of images, corresponding to different wavelength channels, for the same area on the surface of the Earth. Supervised classification of hyperspectral image data sets is a challenging problem due to the limited availability of training samples (which are very difficult and costly to obtain in practice) and the extremely high dimensionality of the data. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-channel morphological profiles for feature extraction prior to classification of remotely sensed hyperspectral data sets using support vector machines (SVMs). In order to introduce multi-channel morphological transformations, which rely on ordering of pixel vectors in multidimensional space, several vector ordering strategies are investigated. A reduced implementation which builds the multi-channel morphological profile based on the first components resulting from a dimensional reduction transformation applied to the input data is also proposed. Our experimental results, conducted using three representative hyperspectral data sets collected by NASA's Airborne Visible-Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor and the German Digital Airborne Imaging Spectrometer (DAIS 7915), reveal that multi-channel morphological profiles can improve single-channel morphological profiles in the task of extracting relevant features for classification of hyperspectral data using small training sets

More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classification

Classification and identification of the materials lying over or beneath the Earth's surface have long been a fundamental but challenging research topic in geoscience and remote sensing (RS) and have garnered a growing concern owing to the recent advancements of deep learning techniques. Although deep networks have been successfully applied in single-modality-dominated classification tasks, yet their performance inevitably meets the bottleneck in complex scenes that need to be finely classified, due to the limitation of information diversity. In this work, we provide a baseline solution to the aforementioned difficulty by developing a general multimodal deep learning (MDL) framework. In particular, we also investigate a special case of multi-modality learning (MML) -- cross-modality learning (CML) that exists widely in RS image classification applications. By focusing on "what", "where", and "how" to fuse, we show different fusion strategies as well as how to train deep networks and build the network architecture. Specifically, five fusion architectures are introduced and developed, further being unified in our MDL framework. More significantly, our framework is not only limited to pixel-wise classification tasks but also applicable to spatial information modeling with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To validate the effectiveness and superiority of the MDL framework, extensive experiments related to the settings of MML and CML are conducted on two different multimodal RS datasets. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TGRS_MDL-RS, contributing to the RS community

INTEGRAÇÃO DE IMAGEM AÉREA DE ALTA RESOLUÇÃO E DADOS DE VARREDURA A LASER NA CLASSIFICAÇÃO DE CENAS URBANAS PARA DETECTAR REGIÕES DE VIA

O problema de extração automática da malha viária urbana é extremamente complexo, uma vez que em cenas urbanas as vias apresentam forte interação com os outros objetos da cena (vegetação, edificações, veículos etc.). Esse problema pode ser simplificado se regiões correspondente às vias forem previamente isoladas. Na sequência, a malha viária urbana pode  ser extraída baseando-se apenas nessas regiões, reduzindo a área de busca e o esforço computacional. A classificação de imagens pode ser usada no intuito de isolar as regiões de via, mas em cenas urbanas complexas a utilização de somente dados espectrais pode não ser suficiente para separar com confiabilidade classes com comportamento espectral similar. Para contornar esse problema, é proposta a integração dos dados geométricos e radiométricos de varredura a laser com imagem aérea RGB de alta resolução numa classificação por Redes Neurais Artificiais, tendo por foco principal o isolamento de regiões de via. O benefício desta integração foi verificado  usando diferentes combinações de dados de entrada na rede. Os experimentos mostraram que a combinação que integra diferentes fontes de dados permitiu separar a classe via com melhor acurácia e que problemas relacionados com as respostas espectrais similares foram minimizados

Integração de imagem aérea de alta resolução e dados de varredura a laser na classificação de cenas urbanas para detectar regiões de via

O problema de extração automática da malha viária urbana é extremamente complexo, uma vez que em cenas urbanas as vias apresentam forte interação com os outros objetos da cena (vegetação, edificações, veículos etc.). Esse problema pode ser simplificado se regiões correspondente às vias forem previamente isoladas. Na sequência, a malha viária urbana pode ser extraída baseando-se apenas nessas regiões, reduzindo a área de busca e o esforço computacional. A classificação de imagens pode ser usada no intuito de isolar as regiões de via, mas em cenas urbanas complexas a utilização de somente dados espectrais pode não ser suficiente para separar com confiabilidade classes com comportamento espectral similar. Para contornar esse problema, é proposta a integração dos dados geométricos e radiométricos de varredura a laser com imagem aérea RGB de alta resolução numa classificação por Redes Neurais Artificiais, tendo por foco principal o isolamento de regiões de via. O benefício desta integração foi verificado usando diferentes combinações de dados de entrada na rede. Os experimentos mostraram que a combinação que integra diferentes fontes de dados permitiu separar a classe via com melhor acurácia e que problemas relacionados com as respostas espectrais similares foram minimizados

Optical and radar remotely sensed data for large-area wildlife habitat mapping

Wildlife habitat mapping strongly supports applications in natural resource management, environmental conservation, impacts of anthropogenic activity, perturbed ecosystem restoration, species-at-risk recovery and species inventory. Remote sensing has long been identified as a feasible and effective technology for large-area wildlife habitat mapping. However, existing and future uncertainties in remote sensing will definitely have a significant effect on relevant scientific research, such as the limitation of Landsat-series data; the negative impact of cloud and cloud shadows (CCS) in optical imagery; and landscape pattern analysis using remote sensing classification products. This thesis adopted a manuscript-style format; it addresses these challenges (or uncertainties) and opportunities through exploring the state-of-the-art optical and radar remotely sensed data for large-area wildlife habitat mapping, and investigating their feasibility and applicability primarily by comparison either on the level of direct remote sensing products (e.g. classification accuracy) or indirect ecological model (e.g. presence/absence and frequency of use model based on landscape pattern analysis). A framework designed to identify and investigate the potential remotely sensed data, including Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Indian Remote Sensing (IRS), and RADARSAT-2, has been developed. The chosen DMC and RADARSAT-2 imagery have acceptable capability of addressing the existing and potential challenges (or uncertainties) in remote sensing of large-area habitat mapping, in order to produce cloud-free thematic maps for the study of wildlife habitat. A quantitative comparison between Landsat-based and IRS-based analyses showed that the characteristics of remote sensing products play an important role in landscape pattern analysis to build grizzly bear presence/absence and frequency of use models

Classification of remote sensing images from urban areas using a fuzzy possibilistic model

International audienceThe classification of very high-resolution remotely sensed images from urban areas is addressed. Previous studies have shown the interest of exploiting the local geometrical information of each pixel to improve the classification. This is performed using the derivative morphological profile (DMP) obtained with a granulometric approach, using opening and closing operators. For each pixel, this DMP constitutes the feature vector on which the classification is based. In this letter, we present an interpretation of the DMP in terms of a fuzzy measurement of the characteristic size and contrast of each structure. This fuzzy measure can be compared to predefined possibility distributions to derive a membership degree for a set of given classes. The decision is taken by selecting the class with the highest membership degree. This model is illustrated and validated in a classification problem using IKONOS images

Classification of Remote Sensing Images from Urban Areas Using a Fuzzy Possibilistic Model

International audienc

Classification of Remote Sensing Images from Urban Areas Using a Fuzzy Possibilistic Model

International audienc