Advances in Hyperspectral Image Classification: Earth monitoring with statistical learning methods

Hyperspectral images show similar statistical properties to natural grayscale or color photographic images. However, the classification of hyperspectral images is more challenging because of the very high dimensionality of the pixels and the small number of labeled examples typically available for learning. These peculiarities lead to particular signal processing problems, mainly characterized by indetermination and complex manifolds. The framework of statistical learning has gained popularity in the last decade. New methods have been presented to account for the spatial homogeneity of images, to include user's interaction via active learning, to take advantage of the manifold structure with semisupervised learning, to extract and encode invariances, or to adapt classifiers and image representations to unseen yet similar scenes. This tutuorial reviews the main advances for hyperspectral remote sensing image classification through illustrative examples.Comment: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 201

Hyperspectral colon tissue cell classification

A novel algorithm to discriminate between normal and malignant tissue cells of the human colon is presented. The microscopic level images of human colon tissue cells were acquired using hyperspectral imaging technology at contiguous wavelength intervals of visible light. While hyperspectral imagery data provides a wealth of information, its large size normally means high computational processing complexity. Several methods exist to avoid the so-called curse of dimensionality and hence reduce the computational complexity. In this study, we experimented with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and two modifications of Independent Component Analysis (ICA). In the first stage of the algorithm, the extracted components are used to separate four constituent parts of the colon tissue: nuclei, cytoplasm, lamina propria, and lumen. The segmentation is performed in an unsupervised fashion using the nearest centroid clustering algorithm. The segmented image is further used, in the second stage of the classification algorithm, to exploit the spatial relationship between the labeled constituent parts. Experimental results using supervised Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification based on multiscale morphological features reveal the discrimination between normal and malignant tissue cells with a reasonable degree of accuracy

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

Techniques for the extraction of spatial and spectral information in the supervised classification of hyperspectral imagery for land-cover applications

The objective of this PhD thesis is the development of spatialspectral information extraction techniques for supervised classification tasks, both by means of classical models and those based on deep learning, to be used in the classification of land use or land cover (LULC) multi- and hyper-spectral images obtained by remote sensing. The main goal is the efficient application of these techniques, so that they are able to obtain satisfactory classification results with a low use of computational resources and low execution time

ES2Net: An Efficient Spectral-Spatial Network for Hyperspectral Image Change Detection

Hyperspectral image change detection (HSI-CD) aims to identify the differences in bitemporal HSIs. To mitigate spectral redundancy and improve the discriminativeness of changing features, some methods introduced band selection technology to select bands conducive for CD. However, these methods are limited by the inability to end-to-end training with the deep learning-based feature extractor and lack considering the complex nonlinear relationship among bands. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end efficient spectral-spatial change detection network (ES2Net) to address these issues. Specifically, we devised a learnable band selection module to automatically select bands conducive to CD. It can be jointly optimized with a feature extraction network and capture the complex nonlinear relationships among bands. Moreover, considering the large spatial feature distribution differences among different bands, we design the cluster-wise spatial attention mechanism that assigns a spatial attention factor to each individual band to individually improve the feature discriminativeness for each band. Experiments on three widely used HSI-CD datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of this method compared with other state-of-the-art methods

Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Using Coupled CNNs

In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective framework to fuse hyperspectral and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data using two coupled convolutional neural networks (CNNs). One CNN is designed to learn spectral-spatial features from hyperspectral data, and the other one is used to capture the elevation information from LiDAR data. Both of them consist of three convolutional layers, and the last two convolutional layers are coupled together via a parameter sharing strategy. In the fusion phase, feature-level and decision-level fusion methods are simultaneously used to integrate these heterogeneous features sufficiently. For the feature-level fusion, three different fusion strategies are evaluated, including the concatenation strategy, the maximization strategy, and the summation strategy. For the decision-level fusion, a weighted summation strategy is adopted, where the weights are determined by the classification accuracy of each output. The proposed model is evaluated on an urban data set acquired over Houston, USA, and a rural one captured over Trento, Italy. On the Houston data, our model can achieve a new record overall accuracy of 96.03%. On the Trento data, it achieves an overall accuracy of 99.12%. These results sufficiently certify the effectiveness of our proposed model

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