Image fusion techniqes for remote sensing applications

Image fusion refers to the acquisition, processing and synergistic combination of information provided by various sensors or by the same sensor in many measuring contexts. The aim of this survey paper is to describe three typical applications of data fusion in remote sensing. The first study case considers the problem of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry, where a pair of antennas are used to obtain an elevation map of the observed scene; the second one refers to the fusion of multisensor and multitemporal (Landsat Thematic Mapper and SAR) images of the same site acquired at different times, by using neural networks; the third one presents a processor to fuse multifrequency, multipolarization and mutiresolution SAR images, based on wavelet transform and multiscale Kalman filter. Each study case presents also results achieved by the proposed techniques applied to real data

Automatic landslide detection using Dempster–Shafer theory from LiDAR-derived data and orthophotos

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. A good landslide inventory map is a prerequisite for landslide hazard and risk analysis. In tropical countries, such as Malaysia, preparation of the landslide inventory is a challenging task because of the rapid growth of vegetation. Thus, it is crucial to use rapid and accurate technique and effective parameters. For this purpose, Dempster Shafer theory (DST) was applied in fusing high resolution LiDAR derived data products and Greenness index derived from orthophoto imagery. Two sites were selected, for the implementation and evaluation of the DST model; site “A” for DST implementation and site “B” for the comparison. For model implementation, vegetation index, slope and height were used as effective parameters for identifying automatic landslide detection. Two type of DST based fusions were evaluated; (greenness and height) and (greenness and slope). Furthermore, validation techniques were used to validate the accuracy are confusion matrix and area under the curve. The overall accuracy of the first and second evaluated fusions were (73.4% and 84.33%), and area under the curve were (0.76 and 0.81) respectively. Additionally, the result was compared with Random Forest (RF) based detection approach. The results showed that DST does not require a priori knowledge

Advances in Multi-Sensor Data Fusion: Algorithms and Applications

With the development of satellite and remote sensing techniques, more and more image data from airborne/satellite sensors have become available. Multi-sensor image fusion seeks to combine information from different images to obtain more inferences than can be derived from a single sensor. In image-based application fields, image fusion has emerged as a promising research area since the end of the last century. The paper presents an overview of recent advances in multi-sensor satellite image fusion. Firstly, the most popular existing fusion algorithms are introduced, with emphasis on their recent improvements. Advances in main applications fields in remote sensing, including object identification, classification, change detection and maneuvering targets tracking, are described. Both advantages and limitations of those applications are then discussed. Recommendations are addressed, including: (1) Improvements of fusion algorithms; (2) Development of “algorithm fusion” methods; (3) Establishment of an automatic quality assessment scheme

Intelligent Feature Extraction, Data Fusion and Detection of Concrete Bridge Cracks: Current Development and Challenges

As a common appearance defect of concrete bridges, cracks are important indices for bridge structure health assessment. Although there has been much research on crack identification, research on the evolution mechanism of bridge cracks is still far from practical applications. In this paper, the state-of-the-art research on intelligent theories and methodologies for intelligent feature extraction, data fusion and crack detection based on data-driven approaches is comprehensively reviewed. The research is discussed from three aspects: the feature extraction level of the multimodal parameters of bridge cracks, the description level and the diagnosis level of the bridge crack damage states. We focus on previous research concerning the quantitative characterization problems of multimodal parameters of bridge cracks and their implementation in crack identification, while highlighting some of their major drawbacks. In addition, the current challenges and potential future research directions are discussed.Comment: Published at Intelligence & Robotics; Its copyright belongs to author

Thermal anomaly detection based on saliency analysis from multimodal imaging sources

Thermal anomaly detection has an important role in remote sensing. One of the most widely used instruments for this task is a Thermal InfraRed (TIR) camera. In this work, thermal anomaly detection is formulated as a salient region detection, which is motivated by the assumption that a hot region often attracts attention of the human eye in thermal infrared images. Using TIR and optical images together, our working hypothesis is defined in the following manner: a hot region that appears as a salient region only in the TIR image and not in the optical image is a thermal anomaly. This work presents a two-step classification method for thermal anomaly detection based on an information fusion of saliency maps derived from both, TIR and optical images. Information fusion, based on the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, is used in the first phase to find the location of regions suspected to be thermal anomalies. This classification problem is formulated as a multi-class problem and is carried out in an unsupervised manner on a pixel level. In the following phase, classification is formulated as a binary region-based problem in order to differentiate between normal temperature variations and thermal anomalies, while Random Forest (RF) is chosen as the classifier. In the seconds phase, the classification results from the previous phase are used as features along with temperature information and height details, which are obtained from a Digital Surface Model (DSM). We tested the approach using a dataset, which was collected from a UAV with TIR and optical cameras for monitoring District Heating Systems (DHS). Despite some limitations outlined in the paper, the presented innovative method to identify thermal anomalies has achieved up to 98.7 percent overall accuracy

Change Detection Methods for Remote Sensing in the Last Decade: A Comprehensive Review

Change detection is an essential and widely utilized task in remote sensing that aims to detect and analyze changes occurring in the same geographical area over time, which has broad applications in urban development, agricultural surveys, and land cover monitoring. Detecting changes in remote sensing images is a complex challenge due to various factors, including variations in image quality, noise, registration errors, illumination changes, complex landscapes, and spatial heterogeneity. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for feature extraction and addressing these challenges. Its versatility has resulted in its widespread adoption for numerous image-processing tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of significant advancements in change detection for remote sensing images over the past decade. We first introduce some preliminary knowledge for the change detection task, such as problem definition, datasets, evaluation metrics, and transformer basics, as well as provide a detailed taxonomy of existing algorithms from three different perspectives: algorithm granularity, supervision modes, and frameworks in the Methodology section. This survey enables readers to gain systematic knowledge of change detection tasks from various angles. We then summarize the state-of-the-art performance on several dominant change detection datasets, providing insights into the strengths and limitations of existing algorithms. Based on our survey, some future research directions for change detection in remote sensing are well identified. This survey paper sheds some light the topic for the community and will inspire further research efforts in the change detection task.</jats:p

Color image segmentation by unsupervised 2D histogram clustering and Dempster-Shafer region merging

In this paper, a color image segmentation method based on a new approach called bimarginal is proposed.To overcome the drawbacks of the classical marginal approaches, color components are considered in pairs in order to have a partial view of their inner correlation. Working with color images, the three possible combinations are considered as three independant information sources. Each pairwise component combination is firstly analyzed according to an unsupervised morphologic clustering which looks for the dominant colors of a 2D histogram. This leads to obtain three segmentation maps combined by intersection after being simplified. The intersection process itself producing an over-segmentation of the image, a pairwise region merging is done according to a similarity criterion with the Dempster-Shafer theory up to a termination criterion. To fully automate the segmentation, an energy function is proposed to quantify the segmentation quality. The latter acts as a performance indicator and is used all over the segmentation to tune its parameters.Dans cet article nous proposons une méthode de segmentation d'images couleur selon une nouvelle approche que nous appelons bi-marginale. Afin de pallier les défauts des approches marginales classiques, nous considérons les composantes couleur deux à deux afin d'avoir une vue partielle de leur corrélation. Travaillant selon cette vision bi-composante, nous considérons les trois combinaisons possible comme trois sources d'informations indépendantes. Chaque information bi-composante est tout d'abord analysée selon un schéma de coalescence morphologique non supervisé qui recherche les couleurs dominantes d'un histogramme bidimensionnel. Cela permet de construire trois cartes de segmentation distinctes qui sont combinées par intersection après avoir été simplifiées. L'intersection produisant une sur-segmentation, une fusion des régions deux à deux est opérée selon un critère de similarité et selon la combinaison de Dempster-Shafer jusqu'à un critère de terminaison. Afin d'automatiser la méthode de segmentation, une mesure d'énergie est proposée afin de quantifier la qualité d'une segmentation, celle-ci sert tout au long de la méthode proposée comme indicateur de performance de la segmentation afin d'en régler les différents paramètres