An approach to a pseudo real-time image processing engine for hyperspectral imaging

Hyperspectral imaging provides an alternative way of increasing the accuracy by adding another dimension: the wavelength. Recently, hyperspectral imaging is also finding its way into many more applications, ranging from medical imaging in endoscopy for cancer detection to quality control in the sorting of fruit and vegetables. But effective use of hyperspectral imaging requires an understanding of the nature and limitations of the data and of various strategies for processing and interpreting it. Also, the breakthrough of this technology is limited by its cost, speed and complicated image interpretation. We have therefore initiated work on designing real-time hyperspectral image processing to tackle these problems by using a combination of smart system design, and pseudo-real time image processing software. The main focus of this paper is the development of a camera-based hyperspectral imaging system for stationary remote sensing applications. The system consists of a high performance digital CCD camera, an intelligent processing unit, an imaging spectrograph, an optional focal plane scanner and a laptop computer equipped with a frame grabbing card. In addition, special software has been developed to synchronize between the frame grabber (video capture card), and the digital camera with different image processing techniques for both digital and hyperspectral data

Bi-Objective Nonnegative Matrix Factorization: Linear Versus Kernel-Based Models

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a powerful class of feature extraction techniques that has been successfully applied in many fields, namely in signal and image processing. Current NMF techniques have been limited to a single-objective problem in either its linear or nonlinear kernel-based formulation. In this paper, we propose to revisit the NMF as a multi-objective problem, in particular a bi-objective one, where the objective functions defined in both input and feature spaces are taken into account. By taking the advantage of the sum-weighted method from the literature of multi-objective optimization, the proposed bi-objective NMF determines a set of nondominated, Pareto optimal, solutions instead of a single optimal decomposition. Moreover, the corresponding Pareto front is studied and approximated. Experimental results on unmixing real hyperspectral images confirm the efficiency of the proposed bi-objective NMF compared with the state-of-the-art methods

Spectral mixture analysis of EELS spectrum-images

Recent advances in detectors and computer science have enabled the acquisition and the processing of multidimensional datasets, in particular in the field of spectral imaging. Benefiting from these new developments, earth scientists try to recover the reflectance spectra of macroscopic materials (e.g., water, grass, mineral types...) present in an observed scene and to estimate their respective proportions in each mixed pixel of the acquired image. This task is usually referred to as spectral mixture analysis or spectral unmixing (SU). SU aims at decomposing the measured pixel spectrum into a collection of constituent spectra, called endmembers, and a set of corresponding fractions (abundances) that indicate the proportion of each endmember present in the pixel. Similarly, when processing spectrum-images, microscopists usually try to map elemental, physical and chemical state information of a given material. This paper reports how a SU algorithm dedicated to remote sensing hyperspectral images can be successfully applied to analyze spectrum-image resulting from electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS). SU generally overcomes standard limitations inherent to other multivariate statistical analysis methods, such as principal component analysis (PCA) or independent component analysis (ICA), that have been previously used to analyze EELS maps. Indeed, ICA and PCA may perform poorly for linear spectral mixture analysis due to the strong dependence between the abundances of the different materials. One example is presented here to demonstrate the potential of this technique for EELS analysis.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication in Ultramicroscop

Object identification and characterization with hyperspectral imagery to identify structure and function of Natura 2000 habitats

Habitat monitoring of designated areas under the EU Habitats Directive requires every 6 years information on area, range, structure and function for the protected (Annex I) habitat types. First results from studies on heathland areas in Belgium and the Netherlands show that hyperspectral imagery can be an important source of information to assist the evaluation of the habitat conservation status. Hyperspectral imagery can provide continuous maps of habitat quality indicators (e.g., life forms or structure types, management activities, grass, shrub and tree encroachment) at the pixel level. At the same time, terrain managers, nature conservation agencies and national authorities responsible for the reporting to the EU are not directly interested in pixels, but rather in information at the level of vegetation patches, groups of patches or the protected site as a whole. Such local level information is needed for management purposes, e.g., exact location of patches of habitat types and the sizes and quality of these patches within a protected site. Site complexity determines not only the classification success of remote sensing imagery, but influences also the results of aggregation of information from the pixel to the site level. For all these reasons, it is important to identify and characterize the vegetation patches. This paper focuses on the use of segmentation techniques to identify relevant vegetation patches in combination with spectral mixture analysis of hyperspectral imagery from the Airborne Hyperspectral Scanner (AHS). Comparison with traditional vegetation maps shows that the habitat or vegetation patches can be identified by segmentation of hyperspectral imagery. This paper shows that spectral mixture analysis in combination with segmentation techniques on hyperspectral imagery can provide useful information on processes such as grass encroachment that determine the conservation status of Natura 2000 heathland areas to a large extent. A limitation is that both advanced remote sensing approaches and traditional field based vegetation surveys seem to cause over and underestimations of grass encroachment for specific categories, but the first provides a better basis for monitoring if specific species are not directly considered

Simultaneous Spectral-Spatial Feature Selection and Extraction for Hyperspectral Images

In hyperspectral remote sensing data mining, it is important to take into account of both spectral and spatial information, such as the spectral signature, texture feature and morphological property, to improve the performances, e.g., the image classification accuracy. In a feature representation point of view, a nature approach to handle this situation is to concatenate the spectral and spatial features into a single but high dimensional vector and then apply a certain dimension reduction technique directly on that concatenated vector before feed it into the subsequent classifier. However, multiple features from various domains definitely have different physical meanings and statistical properties, and thus such concatenation hasn't efficiently explore the complementary properties among different features, which should benefit for boost the feature discriminability. Furthermore, it is also difficult to interpret the transformed results of the concatenated vector. Consequently, finding a physically meaningful consensus low dimensional feature representation of original multiple features is still a challenging task. In order to address the these issues, we propose a novel feature learning framework, i.e., the simultaneous spectral-spatial feature selection and extraction algorithm, for hyperspectral images spectral-spatial feature representation and classification. Specifically, the proposed method learns a latent low dimensional subspace by projecting the spectral-spatial feature into a common feature space, where the complementary information has been effectively exploited, and simultaneously, only the most significant original features have been transformed. Encouraging experimental results on three public available hyperspectral remote sensing datasets confirm that our proposed method is effective and efficient