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

Aerial Vehicle Tracking by Adaptive Fusion of Hyperspectral Likelihood Maps

Hyperspectral cameras can provide unique spectral signatures for consistently distinguishing materials that can be used to solve surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hyperspectral likelihood maps-aided tracking method (HLT) inspired by an adaptive hyperspectral sensor. A moving object tracking system generally consists of registration, object detection, and tracking modules. We focus on the target detection part and remove the necessity to build any offline classifiers and tune a large amount of hyperparameters, instead learning a generative target model in an online manner for hyperspectral channels ranging from visible to infrared wavelengths. The key idea is that, our adaptive fusion method can combine likelihood maps from multiple bands of hyperspectral imagery into one single more distinctive representation increasing the margin between mean value of foreground and background pixels in the fused map. Experimental results show that the HLT not only outperforms all established fusion methods but is on par with the current state-of-the-art hyperspectral target tracking frameworks.Comment: Accepted at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 201

Multisource and Multitemporal Data Fusion in Remote Sensing

The sharp and recent increase in the availability of data captured by different sensors combined with their considerably heterogeneous natures poses a serious challenge for the effective and efficient processing of remotely sensed data. Such an increase in remote sensing and ancillary datasets, however, opens up the possibility of utilizing multimodal datasets in a joint manner to further improve the performance of the processing approaches with respect to the application at hand. Multisource data fusion has, therefore, received enormous attention from researchers worldwide for a wide variety of applications. Moreover, thanks to the revisit capability of several spaceborne sensors, the integration of the temporal information with the spatial and/or spectral/backscattering information of the remotely sensed data is possible and helps to move from a representation of 2D/3D data to 4D data structures, where the time variable adds new information as well as challenges for the information extraction algorithms. There are a huge number of research works dedicated to multisource and multitemporal data fusion, but the methods for the fusion of different modalities have expanded in different paths according to each research community. This paper brings together the advances of multisource and multitemporal data fusion approaches with respect to different research communities and provides a thorough and discipline-specific starting point for researchers at different levels (i.e., students, researchers, and senior researchers) willing to conduct novel investigations on this challenging topic by supplying sufficient detail and references

Graph-based Data Modeling and Analysis for Data Fusion in Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging provides the capability of increased sensitivity and discrimination over traditional imaging methods by combining standard digital imaging with spectroscopic methods. For each individual pixel in a hyperspectral image (HSI), a continuous spectrum is sampled as the spectral reflectance/radiance signature to facilitate identification of ground cover and surface material. The abundant spectrum knowledge allows all available information from the data to be mined. The superior qualities within hyperspectral imaging allow wide applications such as mineral exploration, agriculture monitoring, and ecological surveillance, etc. The processing of massive high-dimensional HSI datasets is a challenge since many data processing techniques have a computational complexity that grows exponentially with the dimension. Besides, a HSI dataset may contain a limited number of degrees of freedom due to the high correlations between data points and among the spectra. On the other hand, merely taking advantage of the sampled spectrum of individual HSI data point may produce inaccurate results due to the mixed nature of raw HSI data, such as mixed pixels, optical interferences and etc. Fusion strategies are widely adopted in data processing to achieve better performance, especially in the field of classification and clustering. There are mainly three types of fusion strategies, namely low-level data fusion, intermediate-level feature fusion, and high-level decision fusion. Low-level data fusion combines multi-source data that is expected to be complementary or cooperative. Intermediate-level feature fusion aims at selection and combination of features to remove redundant information. Decision level fusion exploits a set of classifiers to provide more accurate results. The fusion strategies have wide applications including HSI data processing. With the fast development of multiple remote sensing modalities, e.g. Very High Resolution (VHR) optical sensors, LiDAR, etc., fusion of multi-source data can in principal produce more detailed information than each single source. On the other hand, besides the abundant spectral information contained in HSI data, features such as texture and shape may be employed to represent data points from a spatial perspective. Furthermore, feature fusion also includes the strategy of removing redundant and noisy features in the dataset. One of the major problems in machine learning and pattern recognition is to develop appropriate representations for complex nonlinear data. In HSI processing, a particular data point is usually described as a vector with coordinates corresponding to the intensities measured in the spectral bands. This vector representation permits the application of linear and nonlinear transformations with linear algebra to find an alternative representation of the data. More generally, HSI is multi-dimensional in nature and the vector representation may lose the contextual correlations. Tensor representation provides a more sophisticated modeling technique and a higher-order generalization to linear subspace analysis. In graph theory, data points can be generalized as nodes with connectivities measured from the proximity of a local neighborhood. The graph-based framework efficiently characterizes the relationships among the data and allows for convenient mathematical manipulation in many applications, such as data clustering, feature extraction, feature selection and data alignment. In this thesis, graph-based approaches applied in the field of multi-source feature and data fusion in remote sensing area are explored. We will mainly investigate the fusion of spatial, spectral and LiDAR information with linear and multilinear algebra under graph-based framework for data clustering and classification problems