Deep learning in remote sensing: a review

Standing at the paradigm shift towards data-intensive science, machine learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, as a major breakthrough in the field, deep learning has proven as an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to all? Or, should we resist a 'black-box' solution? There are controversial opinions in the remote sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote sensing data analysis, review the recent advances, and provide resources to make deep learning in remote sensing ridiculously simple to start with. More importantly, we advocate remote sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning, and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented large-scale influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.Comment: Accepted for publication IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazin

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: Theories, Tools and Challenges for the Community

In recent years, deep learning (DL), a re-branding of neural networks (NNs), has risen to the top in numerous areas, namely computer vision (CV), speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. Whereas remote sensing (RS) possesses a number of unique challenges, primarily related to sensors and applications, inevitably RS draws from many of the same theories as CV; e.g., statistics, fusion, and machine learning, to name a few. This means that the RS community should be aware of, if not at the leading edge of, of advancements like DL. Herein, we provide the most comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art RS DL research. We also review recent new developments in the DL field that can be used in DL for RS. Namely, we focus on theories, tools and challenges for the RS community. Specifically, we focus on unsolved challenges and opportunities as it relates to (i) inadequate data sets, (ii) human-understandable solutions for modelling physical phenomena, (iii) Big Data, (iv) non-traditional heterogeneous data sources, (v) DL architectures and learning algorithms for spectral, spatial and temporal data, (vi) transfer learning, (vii) an improved theoretical understanding of DL systems, (viii) high barriers to entry, and (ix) training and optimizing the DL.Comment: 64 pages, 411 references. To appear in Journal of Applied Remote Sensin

Multi-modal gated recurrent units for image description

Using a natural language sentence to describe the content of an image is a challenging but very important task. It is challenging because a description must not only capture objects contained in the image and the relationships among them, but also be relevant and grammatically correct. In this paper a multi-modal embedding model based on gated recurrent units (GRU) which can generate variable-length description for a given image. In the training step, we apply the convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the image feature. Then the feature is imported into the multi-modal GRU as well as the corresponding sentence representations. The multi-modal GRU learns the inter-modal relations between image and sentence. And in the testing step, when an image is imported to our multi-modal GRU model, a sentence which describes the image content is generated. The experimental results demonstrate that our multi-modal GRU model obtains the state-of-the-art performance on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MS COCO datasets.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, magazin