673 research outputs found
Unsupervised multi-scale change detection from SAR imagery for monitoring natural and anthropogenic disasters
Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017Radar remote sensing can play a critical role in operational monitoring of natural and anthropogenic disasters. Despite its all-weather capabilities, and its high performance in mapping, and monitoring of change, the application of radar remote sensing in operational monitoring activities has been limited. This has largely been due to: (1) the historically high costs associated with obtaining radar data; (2) slow data processing, and delivery procedures; and (3) the limited temporal sampling that was provided by spaceborne radar-based satellites. Recent advances in the capabilities of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors have developed an environment that now allows for SAR to make significant contributions to disaster monitoring. New SAR processing strategies that can take full advantage of these new sensor capabilities are currently being developed. Hence, with this PhD dissertation, I aim to: (i) investigate unsupervised change detection techniques that can reliably extract signatures from time series of SAR images, and provide the necessary flexibility for application to a variety of natural, and anthropogenic hazard situations; (ii) investigate effective methods to reduce the effects of speckle and other noise on change detection performance; (iii) automate change detection algorithms using probabilistic Bayesian inferencing; and (iv) ensure that the developed technology is applicable to current, and future SAR sensors to maximize temporal sampling of a hazardous event. This is achieved by developing new algorithms that rely on image amplitude information only, the sole image parameter that is available for every single SAR acquisition. The motivation and implementation of the change detection concept are described in detail in Chapter 3. In the same chapter, I demonstrated the technique's performance using synthetic data as well as a real-data application to map wildfire progression. I applied Radiometric Terrain Correction (RTC) to the data to increase the sampling frequency, while the developed multiscaledriven approach reliably identified changes embedded in largely stationary background scenes. With this technique, I was able to identify the extent of burn scars with high accuracy. I further applied the application of the change detection technology to oil spill mapping. The analysis highlights that the approach described in Chapter 3 can be applied to this drastically different change detection problem with only little modification. While the core of the change detection technique remained unchanged, I made modifications to the pre-processing step to enable change detection from scenes of continuously varying background. I introduced the Lipschitz regularity (LR) transformation as a technique to normalize the typically dynamic ocean surface, facilitating high performance oil spill detection independent of environmental conditions during image acquisition. For instance, I showed that LR processing reduces the sensitivity of change detection performance to variations in surface winds, which is a known limitation in oil spill detection from SAR. Finally, I applied the change detection technique to aufeis flood mapping along the Sagavanirktok River. Due to the complex nature of aufeis flooded areas, I substituted the resolution-preserving speckle filter used in Chapter 3 with curvelet filters. In addition to validating the performance of the change detection results, I also provide evidence of the wealth of information that can be extracted about aufeis flooding events once a time series of change detection information was extracted from SAR imagery. A summary of the developed change detection techniques is conducted and suggested future work is presented in Chapter 6
Analytic Expressions for Stochastic Distances Between Relaxed Complex Wishart Distributions
The scaled complex Wishart distribution is a widely used model for multilook
full polarimetric SAR data whose adequacy has been attested in the literature.
Classification, segmentation, and image analysis techniques which depend on
this model have been devised, and many of them employ some type of
dissimilarity measure. In this paper we derive analytic expressions for four
stochastic distances between relaxed scaled complex Wishart distributions in
their most general form and in important particular cases. Using these
distances, inequalities are obtained which lead to new ways of deriving the
Bartlett and revised Wishart distances. The expressiveness of the four analytic
distances is assessed with respect to the variation of parameters. Such
distances are then used for deriving new tests statistics, which are proved to
have asymptotic chi-square distribution. Adopting the test size as a comparison
criterion, a sensitivity study is performed by means of Monte Carlo experiments
suggesting that the Bhattacharyya statistic outperforms all the others. The
power of the tests is also assessed. Applications to actual data illustrate the
discrimination and homogeneity identification capabilities of these distances.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and
Remote Sensing journa
Nonparametric Edge Detection in Speckled Imagery
We address the issue of edge detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery.
In particular, we propose nonparametric methods for edge detection, and
numerically compare them to an alternative method that has been recently
proposed in the literature. Our results show that some of the proposed methods
display superior results and are computationally simpler than the existing
method. An application to real (not simulated) data is presented and discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in Mathematics and Computers in Simulatio
Likelihood calculation for a class of multiscale stochastic models, with application to texture discrimination
Caption title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-37).Supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. AFOSR-92-J-0002 Supported by the Office of Naval Research. N00014-91-J-1004 Supported by the Army Research Office. DAAL03-92-G-0115Mark R. Luettgen, Alan S. Willsky
EMC2A-Net: An Efficient Multibranch Cross-channel Attention Network for SAR Target Classification
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great
potential in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition. SAR images have
a strong sense of granularity and have different scales of texture features,
such as speckle noise, target dominant scatterers and target contours, which
are rarely considered in the traditional CNN model. This paper proposed two
residual blocks, namely EMC2A blocks with multiscale receptive fields(RFs),
based on a multibranch structure and then designed an efficient isotopic
architecture deep CNN (DCNN), EMC2A-Net. EMC2A blocks utilize parallel dilated
convolution with different dilation rates, which can effectively capture
multiscale context features without significantly increasing the computational
burden. To further improve the efficiency of multiscale feature fusion, this
paper proposed a multiscale feature cross-channel attention module, namely the
EMC2A module, adopting a local multiscale feature interaction strategy without
dimensionality reduction. This strategy adaptively adjusts the weights of each
channel through efficient one-dimensional (1D)-circular convolution and sigmoid
function to guide attention at the global channel wise level. The comparative
results on the MSTAR dataset show that EMC2A-Net outperforms the existing
available models of the same type and has relatively lightweight network
structure. The ablation experiment results show that the EMC2A module
significantly improves the performance of the model by using only a few
parameters and appropriate cross-channel interactions.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and
Remote Sensing, 202
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Meets Deep Learning
This reprint focuses on the application of the combination of synthetic aperture radars and depth learning technology. It aims to further promote the development of SAR image intelligent interpretation technology. A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an important active microwave imaging sensor, whose all-day and all-weather working capacity give it an important place in the remote sensing community. Since the United States launched the first SAR satellite, SAR has received much attention in the remote sensing community, e.g., in geological exploration, topographic mapping, disaster forecast, and traffic monitoring. It is valuable and meaningful, therefore, to study SAR-based remote sensing applications. In recent years, deep learning represented by convolution neural networks has promoted significant progress in the computer vision community, e.g., in face recognition, the driverless field and Internet of things (IoT). Deep learning can enable computational models with multiple processing layers to learn data representations with multiple-level abstractions. This can greatly improve the performance of various applications. This reprint provides a platform for researchers to handle the above significant challenges and present their innovative and cutting-edge research results when applying deep learning to SAR in various manuscript types, e.g., articles, letters, reviews and technical reports
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