LiDAR Data Classification Using Extinction Profiles and a Composite Kernel Support Vector Machine

This letter proposes a novel framework for the classification of LiDAR-derived features. In this context, several features are extracted directly from the LiDAR point cloud data using aggregated local point neighborhoods, including laser echo ratio, variance of point elevation, plane fitting residuals, and echo intensity. Additionally, the LiDAR Digital Surface Model (DSM) is input to our classification. Thus, both the LiDAR raster DSM and also rich geometric and also backscatter 3D point cloud information aggregated to images are considered in our workflow. These extracted features are characterized as base images to be fed to extinction profiles to model spatial and contextual information. Then, a composite kernel SVM is investigated to efficiently integrate the elevation and spatial information suitable for the LiDAR data. Results indicate that the proposed method can obtain high classification accuracy using LiDAR data alone (e.g., more than 86% overall accuracy on the benchmark Houston LiDAR data using the standard set of training and test samples on all 15 classes) in a short CPU processing time

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