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

Noise-Robust Voice Conversion

A persistent challenge in speech processing is the presence of noise that reduces the quality of speech signals. Whether natural speech is used as input or speech is the desirable output to be synthesized, noise degrades the performance of these systems and causes output speech to be unnatural. Speech enhancement deals with such a problem, typically seeking to improve the input speech or post-processes the (re)synthesized speech. An intriguing complement to post-processing speech signals is voice conversion, in which speech by one person (source speaker) is made to sound as if spoken by a different person (target speaker). Traditionally, the majority of speech enhancement and voice conversion methods rely on parametric modeling of speech. A promising complement to parametric models is an inventory-based approach, which is the focus of this work. In inventory-based speech systems, one records an inventory of clean speech signals as a reference. Noisy speech (in the case of enhancement) or target speech (in the case of conversion) can then be replaced by the best-matching clean speech in the inventory, which is found via a correlation search method. Such an approach has the potential to alleviate intelligibility and unnaturalness issues often encountered by parametric modeling speech processing systems. This work investigates and compares inventory-based speech enhancement methods with conventional ones. In addition, the inventory search method is applied to estimate source speaker characteristics for voice conversion in noisy environments. Two noisy-environment voice conversion systems were constructed for a comparative study: a direct voice conversion system and an inventory-based voice conversion system, both with limited noise filtering at the front end. Results from this work suggest that the inventory method offers encouraging improvements over the direct conversion method

Digital Signal Processing

Contains introduction and reports on seventeen research projects.U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-81-K-0742)U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-77-C-0266)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS80-07102)Bell Laboratories FellowshipAmoco Foundation FellowshipSchlumberger-Doll Research Center FellowshipSanders Associates, Inc.Toshiba Company FellowshipM.I.T. Vinton Hayes FellowshipHertz Foundation Fellowshi

Digital Signal Processing

Contains table of contents for Part III, table of contents for Section 1, an introduction and reports on seventeen research projects.National Science Foundation FellowshipNational Science Foundation (Grant ECS 84-07285)National Science Foundation (Grant MIP 87-14969)U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-81-K-0742)Scholarship from the Federative Republic of BrazilU.S. Air Force - Electronic Systems Division (Contract F19628-85-K-0028)AT&T Bell Laboratories Doctoral Support ProgramCanada, Bell Northern Research ScholarshipCanada, Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et I'Aide a la Recherche Postgraduate FellowshipSanders Associates, Inc.OKI Semiconductor, Inc.Tel Aviv University, Department of Electronic SystemsU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research (Contract N00014-85-K-0272)Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Science and Engineering Scholarshi

Noise-Enhanced and Human Visual System-Driven Image Processing: Algorithms and Performance Limits

This dissertation investigates the problem of image processing based on stochastic resonance (SR) noise and human visual system (HVS) properties, where several novel frameworks and algorithms for object detection in images, image enhancement and image segmentation as well as the method to estimate the performance limit of image segmentation algorithms are developed. Object detection in images is a fundamental problem whose goal is to make a decision if the object of interest is present or absent in a given image. We develop a framework and algorithm to enhance the detection performance of suboptimal detectors using SR noise, where we add a suitable dose of noise into the original image data and obtain the performance improvement. Micro-calcification detection is employed in this dissertation as an illustrative example. The comparative experiments with a large number of images verify the efficiency of the presented approach. Image enhancement plays an important role and is widely used in various vision tasks. We develop two image enhancement approaches. One is based on SR noise, HVS-driven image quality evaluation metrics and the constrained multi-objective optimization (MOO) technique, which aims at refining the existing suboptimal image enhancement methods. Another is based on the selective enhancement framework, under which we develop several image enhancement algorithms. The two approaches are applied to many low quality images, and they outperform many existing enhancement algorithms. Image segmentation is critical to image analysis. We present two segmentation algorithms driven by HVS properties, where we incorporate the human visual perception factors into the segmentation procedure and encode the prior expectation on the segmentation results into the objective functions through Markov random fields (MRF). Our experimental results show that the presented algorithms achieve higher segmentation accuracy than many representative segmentation and clustering algorithms available in the literature. Performance limit, or performance bound, is very useful to evaluate different image segmentation algorithms and to analyze the segmentability of the given image content. We formulate image segmentation as a parameter estimation problem and derive a lower bound on the segmentation error, i.e., the mean square error (MSE) of the pixel labels considered in our work, using a modified Cramér-Rao bound (CRB). The derivation is based on the biased estimator assumption, whose reasonability is verified in this dissertation. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the derived bound

Toward enhancement of deep learning techniques using fuzzy logic: a survey

Deep learning has emerged recently as a type of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), it usually imitates the human way in gaining a particular knowledge type. Deep learning is considered an essential data science element, which comprises predictive modeling and statistics. Deep learning makes the processes of collecting, interpreting, and analyzing big data easier and faster. Deep neural networks are kind of ML models, where the non-linear processing units are layered for the purpose of extracting particular features from the inputs. Actually, the training process of similar networks is very expensive and it also depends on the used optimization method, hence optimal results may not be provided. The techniques of deep learning are also vulnerable to data noise. For these reasons, fuzzy systems are used to improve the performance of deep learning algorithms, especially in combination with neural networks. Fuzzy systems are used to improve the representation accuracy of deep learning models. This survey paper reviews some of the deep learning based fuzzy logic models and techniques that were presented and proposed in the previous studies, where fuzzy logic is used to improve deep learning performance. The approaches are divided into two categories based on how both of the samples are combined. Furthermore, the models' practicality in the actual world is revealed