Hyperspectral Unmixing on Multicore DSPs: Trading Off Performance for Energy

Wider coverage of observation missions will increase onboard power restrictions while, at the same time, pose higher demands from the perspective of processing time, thus asking for the exploration of novel high-performance and low-power processing architectures. In this paper, we analyze the acceleration of spectral unmixing, a key technique to process hyperspectral images, on multicore architectures. To meet onboard processing restrictions, we employ a low-power Digital Signal Processor (DSP), comparing processing time and energy consumption with those of a representative set of commodity architectures. We demonstrate that DSPs offer a fair balance between ease of programming, performance, and energy consumption, resulting in a highly appealing platform to meet the restrictions of current missions if onboard processing is required

Hyperspectral Unmixing Based on Dual-Depth Sparse Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis

This paper presents a novel approach for spectral unmixing of remotely sensed hyperspectral data. It exploits probabilistic latent topics in order to take advantage of the semantics pervading the latent topic space when identifying spectral signatures and estimating fractional abundances from hyperspectral images. Despite the contrasted potential of topic models to uncover image semantics, they have been merely used in hyperspectral unmixing as a straightforward data decomposition process. This limits their actual capabilities to provide semantic representations of the spectral data. The proposed model, called dual-depth sparse probabilistic latent semantic analysis (DEpLSA), makes use of two different levels of topics to exploit the semantic patterns extracted from the initial spectral space in order to relieve the ill-posed nature of the unmixing problem. In other words, DEpLSA defines a first level of deep topics to capture the semantic representations of the spectra, and a second level of restricted topics to estimate endmembers and abundances over this semantic space. An experimental comparison in conducted using the two standard topic models and the seven state-of-the-art unmixing methods available in the literature. Our experiments, conducted using four different hyperspectral images, reveal that the proposed approach is able to provide competitive advantages over available unmixing approaches

Ensemble classifiers for land cover mapping

This study presents experimental investigations on supervised ensemble classification for land cover classification. Despite the arrays of classifiers available in machine learning to create an ensemble, knowing and understanding the correct classifier to use for a particular dataset remains a major challenge. The ensemble method increases classification accuracy by consulting experts taking final decision in the classification process. This study generated various land cover maps, using image classification. This is to authenticate the number of classifiers that should be used for creating an ensemble. The study exploits feature selection techniques to create diversity in ensemble classification. Landsat imagery of Kampala (the capital of Uganda, East Africa), AVIRIS hyperspectral dataset of Indian pine of Indiana and Support Vector Machines were used to carry out the investigation. The research reveals that the superiority of different classification approaches employed depends on the datasets used. In addition, the pre-processing stage and the strategy used during the designing phase of each classifier is very essential. The results obtained from the experiments conducted showed that, there is no significant benefit in using many base classifiers for decision making in ensemble classification. The research outcome also reveals how to design better ensemble using feature selection approach for land cover mapping. The study also reports the experimental comparison of generalized support vector machines, random forests, C4.5, neural network and bagging classifiers for land cover classification of hyperspectral images. These classifiers are among the state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods for solving complex pattern recognition problems. The pixel purity index was used to obtain the endmembers from the Indiana pine and Washington DC mall hyperspectral image datasets. Generalized reduced gradient optimization algorithm was used to estimate fractional abundance in the image dataset thereafter obtained numeric values for land cover classification. The fractional abundance of each pixel was obtained using the spectral signature values of the endmembers and pixel values of class labels. As the results of the experiments, the classifiers show promising results. Using Indiana pine and Washington DC mall hyperspectral datasets, experimental comparison of all the classifiers’ performances reveals that random forests outperforms the other classifiers and it is computational effective. The study makes a positive contribution to the problem of classifying land cover hyperspectral images by exploring the use of generalized reduced gradient method and five supervised classifiers. The accuracy comparison of these classifiers is valuable for decision makers to consider tradeoffs in method accuracy versus complexity. The results from the research has attracted nine publications which include, six international and one local conference papers, one published in Computing Research Repository (CoRR), one Journal paper submitted and one Springer book chapter, Abe et al., 2012 obtained a merit award based on the reviewer reports and the score reports of the conference committee members during the conference period

Challenges and Opportunities of Multimodality and Data Fusion in Remote Sensing

International audience—Remote sensing is one of the most common ways to extract relevant information about the Earth and our environment. Remote sensing acquisitions can be done by both active (synthetic aperture radar, LiDAR) and passive (optical and thermal range, multispectral and hyperspectral) devices. According to the sensor, a variety of information about the Earth's surface can be obtained. The data acquired by these sensors can provide information about the structure (optical, synthetic aperture radar), elevation (LiDAR) and material content (multi and hyperspectral) of the objects in the image. Once considered together their comple-mentarity can be helpful for characterizing land use (urban analysis, precision agriculture), damage detection (e.g., in natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, oil-spills in seas), and give insights to potential exploitation of resources (oil fields, minerals). In addition, repeated acquisitions of a scene at different times allows one to monitor natural resources and environmental variables (vegetation phenology, snow cover), anthropological effects (urban sprawl, deforestation), climate changes (desertification, coastal erosion) among others. In this paper, we sketch the current opportunities and challenges related to the exploitation of multimodal data for Earth observation. This is done by leveraging the outcomes of the Data Fusion contests, organized by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society since 2006. We will report on the outcomes of these contests, presenting the multimodal sets of data made available to the community each year, the targeted applications and an analysis of the submitted methods and results: How was multimodality considered and integrated in the processing chain? What were the improvements/new opportunities offered by the fusion? What were the objectives to be addressed and the reported solutions? And from this, what will be the next challenges

Soil erosion in the Alps : causes and risk assessment

The issue of soil erosion in the Alps has long been neglected due to the low economic value of the agricultural land. However, soil stability is a key parameter which affects ecosystem services like slope stability, water budgets (drinking water reservoirs as well as flood prevention), vegetation productivity, ecosystem biodiversity and nutrient production. In alpine regions, spatial estimates on soil erosion are difficult to derive because the highly heterogeneous biogeophysical structure impedes measurement of soil erosion and the applicability of soil erosion models. However, remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) methods allow for spatial estimation of soil erosion by direct detection of erosion features and supply of input data for soil erosion models. Thus, the main objective of this work is to address the problem of soil erosion risk assessment in the Alps on catchment scale with remote sensing and GIS tools. Regarding soil erosion processes the focus is on soil erosion by water (here sheet erosion) and gravity (here landslides). For these two processes we address i) the monitoring and mapping of the erosion features and related causal factors ii) soil erosion risk assessment with special emphasis on iii) the validation of existing models for alpine areas. All investigations were accomplished in the Urseren Valley (Central Swiss Alps) where the valley slopes are dramatically affected by sheet erosion and landslides. For landslides, a natural susceptibility of the catchment has been indicated by bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis. Geology, slope and stream density are the most significant static landslide causal factors. Static factors are here defined as factors that do not change their attributes during the considered time span of the study (45 years), e.g. geology, stream network. The occurrence of landslides might be significantly increased by the combined effects of global climate and land use change. Thus, our hypothesis is that more recent changes in land use and climate affected the spatial and temporal occurrence of landslides. The increase of the landslide area of 92% within 45 years in the study site confirmed our hypothesis. In order to identify the cause for the trend in landslide occurrence time-series of landslide causal factors were analysed. The analysis revealed increasing trends in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events and stocking of pasture animals. These developments presumably enhanced landslide hazard. Moreover, changes in land-cover and land use were shown to have affected landslide occurrence. For instance, abandoned areas and areas with recently emerging shrub vegetation show very low landslide densities. Detailed spatial analysis of the land use with GIS and interviews with farmers confirmed the strong influence of the land use management practises on slope stability. The definite identification and quantification of the impact of these non-stationary landslide causal factors (dynamic factors) on the landslide trend was not possible due to the simultaneous change of several factors. The consideration of dynamic factors in statistical landslide susceptibility assessments is still unsolved. The latter may lead to erroneous model predictions, especially in times of dramatic environmental change. Thus, we evaluated the effect of dynamic landslide causal factors on the validity of landslide susceptibility maps for spatial and temporal predictions. For this purpose, a logistic regression model based on data of the year 2000 was set up. The resulting landslide susceptibility map was valid for spatial predictions. However, the model failed to predict the landslides that occurred in a subsequent event. In order to handle this weakness of statistic landslide modelling a multitemporal approach was developed. It is based on establishing logistic regression models for two points in time (here 1959 and 2000). Both models could correctly classify >70% of the independent spatial validation dataset. By subtracting the 1959 susceptibility map from the 2000 susceptibility map a deviation susceptibility map was obtained. Our interpretation was that these susceptibility deviations indicate the effect of dynamic causal factors on the landslide probability. The deviation map explained 85% of new independent landslides occurring after 2000. Thus, we believe it to be a suitable tool to add a time element to a susceptibility map pointing to areas with changing susceptibility due to recently changing environmental conditions or human interactions. In contrast to landslides that are a direct threat to buildings and infrastructure, sheet erosion attracts less attention because it is often an unseen process. Nonetheless, sheet erosion may account for a major proportion of soil loss. Soil loss by sheet erosion is related to high spatial variability, however, in contrast to arable fields for alpine grasslands erosion damages are long lasting and visible over longer time periods. A crucial erosion triggering parameter that can be derived from satellite imagery is fractional vegetation cover (FVC). Measurements of the radiogenic isotope Cs-137, which is a common tracer for soil erosion, confirm the importance of FVC for soil erosion yield in alpine areas. Linear spectral unmixing (LSU), mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) and the spectral index NDVI are applied for estimating fractional abundance of vegetation and bare soil. To account for the small scale heterogeneity of the alpine landscape very high resolved multispectral QuickBird imagery is used. The performance of LSU and MTMF for estimating percent vegetation cover is good (r²=0.85, r²=0.71 respectively). A poorer performance is achieved for bare soil (r²=0.28, r²=0.39 respectively) because compared to vegetation, bare soil has a less characteristic spectral signature in the wavelength domain detected by the QuickBird sensor. Apart from monitoring erosion controlling factors, quantification of soil erosion by applying soil erosion risk models is done. The performance of the two established models Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and Pan-European Soil Erosion Risk Assessment (PESERA) for their suitability to model erosion for mountain environments is tested. Cs-137 is used to verify the resulting erosion rates from USLE and PESERA. PESERA yields no correlation to measured Cs-137 long term erosion rates and shows lower sensitivity to FVC. Thus, USLE is used to model the entire study site. The LSU-derived FVC map is used to adapt the C factor of the USLE. Compared to the low erosion rates computed with the former available low resolution dataset (1:25000) the satellite supported USLE map shows “hotspots” of soil erosion of up to 16 t ha-1 a-1. In general, Cs-137 in combination with the USLE is a very suitable method to assess soil erosion for larger areas, as both give estimates on long-term soil erosion. Especially for inaccessible alpine areas, GIS and remote sensing proved to be powerful tools that can be used for repetitive measurements of erosion features and causal factors. In times of global change it is of crucial importance to account for temporal developments. However, the evaluation of the applied soil erosion risk models revealed that the implementation of temporal aspects, such as varying climate, land use and vegetation cover is still insufficient. Thus, the proposed validation strategies (spatial, temporal and via Cs-137) are essential. Further case studies in alpine regions are needed to test the methods elaborated for the Urseren Valley. However, the presented approaches are promising with respect to improve the monitoring and identification of soil erosion risk areas in alpine regions

A Stepwise Analytical Projected Gradient Descent Search for Hyperspectral Unmixing and Its Code Vectorization

We present, in this paper, a new methodology for spectral unmixing, where a vector of fractions, corresponding to a set of endmembers (EMs), is estimated for each pixel in the image. The process first provides an initial estimate of the fraction vector, followed by an iterative procedure that converges to an optimal solution. Specifically, projected gradient descent (PGD) optimization is applied to (a variant of) the spectral angle mapper objective function, so as to significantly reduce the estimation error due to amplitude (i.e., magnitude) variations in EM spectra, caused by the illumination change effect. To improve the computational efficiency of our method over a commonly used gradient descent technique, we have analytically derived the objective function's gradient and the optimal step size (used in each iteration). To gain further improvement, we have implemented our unmixing module via code vectorization, where the entire process is ''folded'' into a single loop, and the fractions for all of the pixels are solved simultaneously. We call this new parallel scheme vectorized code PGD unmixing (VPGDU). VPGDU has the advantage of solving (simultaneously) an independent optimization problem per image pixel, exactly as other pixelwise algorithms, but significantly faster. Its performance was compared with the commonly used fully constrained least squares unmixing (FCLSU), the generalized bilinear model (GBM) method for hyperspectral unmixng, and the fast state-of-the-art methods, sparse unmixing by variable splitting and augmented Lagrangian (SUnSAL) and collaborative SUnSAL (CLSUnSAL) based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Considering all of the prospective EMs of a scene at each pixel (i.e., without a priori knowledge which/how many EMs are actually present in a given pixel), we demonstrate that the accuracy due to VPGDU is considerably higher than that obtained by FCLSU, GBM, SUnSAL, and CLSUnSAL under varying illumination, and is, otherwise, comparable with respect to these methods. However, while our method is significantly faster than FCLSU and GBM, it is slower than SUnSAL and CLSUnSAL by roughly an order of magnitude.Israel Science Ministry Scientific Infrastructure Research Grant Scheme, Helen Norman Asher Space Research Grant Scheme, Technion PhD Scholarship, new England fund Technion, Environmental Mapping and Monitoring of Iceland by Remote Sensing EMMIRS projectPeer Reviewe

スペクトルの線形性を考慮したハイパースペクトラル画像のノイズ除去とアンミキシングに関する研究

This study aims to generalize color line to M-dimensional spectral line feature (M>3) and introduce methods for denoising and unmixing of hyperspectral images based on the spectral linearity.For denoising, we propose a local spectral component decomposition method based on the spectral line. We first calculate the spectral line of an M-channel image, then using the line, we decompose the image into three components: a single M-channel image and two gray-scale images. By virtue of the decomposition, the noise is concentrated on the two images, thus the algorithm needs to denoise only two grayscale images, regardless of the number of channels. For unmixing, we propose an algorithm that exploits the low-rank local abundance by applying the unclear norm to the abundance matrix for local regions of spatial and abundance domains. In optimization problem, the local abundance regularizer is collaborated with the L2, 1 norm and the total variation.北九州市立大

Caracterização e estudo comparativo de exsudações de hidrocarbonetos e plays petrolíferos em bacias terrestres das regiões central do Irã e sudeste do Brasil usando sensoriamento remoto espectral

Orientador: Carlos Roberto de Souza FilhoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de GeociênciasResumo: O objetivo desta pesquisa foi explorar as assinaturas de exsudações de hidrocarbonetos na superfície usando a tecnologia de detecção remota espectral. Isso foi alcançado primeiro, realizando uma revisão abrangente das capacidades e potenciais técnicas de detecção direta e indireta. Em seguida, a técnica foi aplicada para investigar dois locais de teste localizados no Irã e no Brasil, conhecidos por hospedar sistemas ativos de micro-exsudações e afloramentos betuminosos, respectivamente. A primeira área de estudo está localizada perto da cidade de Qom (Irã), e está inserida no campo petrolífero Alborz, enterrado sob sedimentos datados do Oligoceno da Formação Upper Red. O segundo local está localizado perto da cidade de Anhembi (SP), na margem oriental da bacia do Paraná, no Brasil, e inclui acumulações de betume em arenitos triássicos da Formação Pirambóia. O trabalho na área de Qom integrou evidências de (i) estudos petrográficos e geoquímicos em laboratório, (ii) investigações de afloramentos em campo, e (iii) mapeamento de anomalia em larga escala através de conjuntos de dados multi-espectrais ASTER e Sentinel-2. O resultado deste estudo se trata de novos indicadores mineralógicos e geoquímicos para a exploração de micro-exsudações e um modelo de micro-exsudações atualizado. Durante este trabalho, conseguimos desenvolver novas metodologias para análise de dados espectroscópicos. Através da utilização de dados simulados, indicamos que o instrumento de satélite WorldView-3 tem potencial para detecção direta de hidrocarbonetos. Na sequência do estudo, dados reais sobre afloramentos de arenitos e óleo na área de Anhembi foram investigados. A área foi fotografada novamente no chão e usando o sistema de imagem hiperespectral AisaFENIX. Seguiu-se estudos e amostragem no campo,incluindo espectroscopia de alcance fechado das amostras no laboratório usando instrumentos de imagem (ou seja, sisuCHEMA) e não-imagem (ou seja, FieldSpec-4). O estudo demonstrou que uma abordagem espectroscópica multi-escala poderia fornecer uma imagem completa das variações no conteúdo e composição do betume e minerais de alteração que acompanham. A assinatura de hidrocarbonetos, especialmente a centrada em 2300 nm, mostrou-se consistente e comparável entre as escalas e capaz de estimar o teor de betume de areias de petróleo em todas as escalas de imagemAbstract: The objective of this research was to explore for the signatures of seeping hydrocarbons on the surface using spectral remote sensing technology. It was achieved firstly by conducting a comprehensive review of the capacities and potentials of the technique for direct and indirect seepage detection. Next, the technique was applied to investigate two distinctive test sites located in Iran and Brazil known to retain active microseepage systems and bituminous outcrops, respectively. The first study area is located near the city of Qom in Iran, and consists of Alborz oilfield buried under Oligocene sediments of the Upper-Red Formation. The second site is located near the town of Anhembi on the eastern edge of the Paraná Basin in Brazil and includes bitumen accumulations in the Triassic sandstones of the Pirambóia Formation. Our work in Qom area integrated evidence from (i) petrographic, spectroscopic, and geochemical studies in the laboratory, (ii) outcrop investigations in the field, and (iii) broad-scale anomaly mapping via orbital remote sensing data. The outcomes of this study was novel mineralogical and geochemical indicators for microseepage characterization and a classification scheme for the microseepage-induced alterations. Our study indicated that active microseepage systems occur in large parts of the lithofacies in Qom area, implying that the extent of the petroleum reservoir is much larger than previously thought. During this work, we also developed new methodologies for spectroscopic data analysis and processing. On the other side, by using simulated data, we indicated that WorldView-3 satellite instrument has the potential for direct hydrocarbon detection. Following this demonstration, real datasets were acquired over oil-sand outcrops of the Anhembi area. The area was further imaged on the ground and from the air by using an AisaFENIX hyperspectral imaging system. This was followed by outcrop studies and sampling in the field and close-range spectroscopy in the laboratory using both imaging (i.e. sisuCHEMA) and nonimaging instruments. The study demonstrated that a multi-scale spectroscopic approach could provide a complete picture of the variations in the content and composition of bitumen and associated alteration mineralogy. The oil signature, especially the one centered at 2300 nm, was shown to be consistent and comparable among scales, and capable of estimating the bitumen content of oil-sands at all imaging scalesDoutoradoGeologia e Recursos NaturaisDoutor em Geociências2015/06663-7FAPES