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

Accelerated Extinction Profiles for Anomaly Detection in Fluvial Ecosystems

New multispectral sensors, which are capable of capturing high resolution images through low altitude drone flights, offer access to a wealth of information about the Earth's surface at a significantly lower cost than other imaging devices. The process of identifying unexpected patterns within an image that do not conform to the expected behavior is known as anomaly detection (AD). When applied to fluvial ecosystem monitoring, this involves detecting the existence of small constructions or roads that allow automatic alarms to be produced for the people in charge of monitoring the ecosystem. The extraction of spatial information is a critical step in AD, since it determines the final quality of the AD and it is a computationally expensive processing. In this work, Extinction Profiles (EP) are selected to perform a multilevel implicit segmentation of the image, thus extracting the spatial information of relevance. A computationally efficient implementation of the EP-based spatial extraction of information for multidimensional images is proposed in this paper, as it is a basic step in the detection of anomalies in natural ecosystems. The proposed method takes advantage of heterogeneous computing to perform the task in a reduced execution time.This work was supported in part by grants PID2019--104834GB--I00, PID2022-141623NB-I00, and TED2021--130367B--I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. It was also supported by Xunta de Galicia - Consellería de Cultura, Educación, Formación Profesional e Universidades [Centro de investigación de Galicia accreditation 2019-2022 ED431G-2019/04 and Reference Competitive Group accreditation, ED431C-2022/16], by Junta de Castilla y León [Project VA226P20 (PROPHET--II)], and by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

Binary partition trees-based robust adaptive hyperspectral RX anomaly detection

International audienceThe Reed-Xiaoli (RX) is considered as the benchmark algorithm in multidimensional anomaly detection (AD). However, the RX detector performance decreases when the statistical parameters estimation is poor. This could happen when the background is non-homogeneous or the noise independence assumption is not fulfilled. For a better performance, the statistical parameters are estimated locally using a sliding window approach. In this approach, called adaptive RX, a window is centered over the pixel under the test (PUT), so the background mean and covariance statistics are estimated us- ing the data samples lying inside the window's spatial support, named the secondary data. Sometimes, a smaller guard window prevents those pixels close to the PUT to be used, in order to avoid the presence of outliers in the statistical estimation. The size of the window is chosen large enough to ensure the invertibility of the covariance matrix and small enough to justify both spatial and spectral homogeneity. We present here an alternative methodology to select the secondary data for a PUT by means of a binary partition tree (BPT) representation of the image. We test the proposed BPT-based adaptive hyperspectral RX AD algorithm using a real dataset provided by the Target Detection Blind Test project

Hyperspectral Image Processing Using Locally Linear Embedding

We describe a method of processing hyperspectral images of natural scenes that uses a combination of k-means clustering and locally linear embedding (LLE). The primary goal is to assist anomaly detection by preserving spectral uniqueness among the pixels. In order to reduce redundancy among the pixels, adjacent pixels which are spectrally similar are grouped using the k-means clustering algorithm. Representative pixels from each cluster are chosen and passed to the LLE algorithm, where the high dimensional spectral vectors are encoded by a low dimensional mapping. Finally, monochromatic and tri-chromatic images are constructed from the k-means cluster assignments and LLE vector mappings. The method generates images where differences in the original spectra are reflected in differences in the output vector assignments. An additional benefit of mapping to a lower dimensional space is reduced data size. When spectral irregularities are added to a patch of the hyperspectral images, again the method successfully generated color assignments that detected the changes in the spectra

A Locally Adaptable Iterative RX Detector

We present an unsupervised anomaly detection method for hyperspectral imagery (HSI) based on data characteristics inherit in HSI. A locally adaptive technique of iteratively refining the well-known RX detector (LAIRX) is developed. The technique is motivated by the need for better first- and second-order statistic estimation via avoidance of anomaly presence. Overall, experiments show favorable Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves when compared to a global anomaly detector based upon the Support Vector Data Description (SVDD) algorithm, the conventional RX detector, and decomposed versions of the LAIRX detector. Furthermore, the utilization of parallel and distributed processing allows fast processing time making LAIRX applicable in an operational setting

Spectral Target Detecting Using Schroedinger Eigenmaps

Applications of optical remote sensing processes include environmental monitoring, military monitoring, meteorology, mapping, surveillance, etc. Many of these tasks include the detection of specific objects or materials, usually few or small, which are surrounded by other materials that clutter the scene and hide the relevant information. This target detection process has been boosted lately by the use of hyperspectral imagery (HSI) since its high spectral dimension provides more detailed spectral information that is desirable in data exploitation. Typical spectral target detectors rely on statistical or geometric models to characterize the spectral variability of the data. However, in many cases these parametric models do not fit well HSI data that impacts the detection performance. On the other hand, non-linear transformation methods, mainly based on manifold learning algorithms, have shown a potential use in HSI transformation, dimensionality reduction and classification. In target detection, non-linear transformation algorithms are used as preprocessing techniques that transform the data to a more suitable lower dimensional space, where the statistical or geometric detectors are applied. One of these non-linear manifold methods is the Schroedinger Eigenmaps (SE) algorithm that has been introduced as a technique for semi-supervised classification. The core tool of the SE algorithm is the Schroedinger operator that includes a potential term that encodes prior information about the materials present in a scene, and enables the embedding to be steered in some convenient directions in order to cluster similar pixels together. A completely novel target detection methodology based on SE algorithm is proposed for the first time in this thesis. The proposed methodology does not just include the transformation of the data to a lower dimensional space but also includes the definition of a detector that capitalizes on the theory behind SE. The fact that target pixels and those similar pixels are clustered in a predictable region of the low-dimensional representation is used to define a decision rule that allows one to identify target pixels over the rest of pixels in a given image. In addition, a knowledge propagation scheme is used to combine spectral and spatial information as a means to propagate the \potential constraints to nearby points. The propagation scheme is introduced to reinforce weak connections and improve the separability between most of the target pixels and the background. Experiments using different HSI data sets are carried out in order to test the proposed methodology. The assessment is performed from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, and by comparing the SE-based methodology against two other detection methodologies that use linear/non-linear algorithms as transformations and the well-known Adaptive Coherence/Cosine Estimator (ACE) detector. Overall results show that the SE-based detector outperforms the other two detection methodologies, which indicates the usefulness of the SE transformation in spectral target detection problems