6 research outputs found
Thick Cloud Removal of Remote Sensing Images Using Temporal Smoothness and Sparsity-Regularized Tensor Optimization
In remote sensing images, the presence of thick cloud accompanying cloud
shadow is a high probability event, which can affect the quality of subsequent
processing and limit the scenarios of application. Hence, removing the thick
cloud and cloud shadow as well as recovering the cloud-contaminated pixels is
indispensable to make good use of remote sensing images. In this paper, a novel
thick cloud removal method for remote sensing images based on temporal
smoothness and sparsity-regularized tensor optimization (TSSTO) is proposed.
The basic idea of TSSTO is that the thick cloud and cloud shadow are not only
sparse but also smooth along the horizontal and vertical direction in images
while the clean images are smooth along the temporal direction between images.
Therefore, the sparsity norm is used to boost the sparsity of the cloud and
cloud shadow, and unidirectional total variation (UTV) regularizers are applied
to ensure the unidirectional smoothness. This paper utilizes alternation
direction method of multipliers to solve the presented model and generate the
cloud and cloud shadow element as well as the clean element. The cloud and
cloud shadow element is purified to get the cloud area and cloud shadow area.
Then, the clean area of the original cloud-contaminated images is replaced to
the corresponding area of the clean element. Finally, the reference image is
selected to reconstruct details of the cloud area and cloud shadow area using
the information cloning method. A series of experiments are conducted both on
simulated and real cloud-contaminated images from different sensors and with
different resolutions, and the results demonstrate the potential of the
proposed TSSTO method for removing cloud and cloud shadow from both qualitative
and quantitative viewpoints
Image restoration with group sparse representation and low‐rank group residual learning
Image restoration, as a fundamental research topic of image processing, is to reconstruct the original image from degraded signal using the prior knowledge of image. Group sparse representation (GSR) is powerful for image restoration; it however often leads to undesirable sparse solutions in practice. In order to improve the quality of image restoration based on GSR, the sparsity residual model expects the representation learned from degraded images to be as close as possible to the true representation. In this article, a group residual learning based on low-rank self-representation is proposed to automatically estimate the true group sparse representation. It makes full use of the relation among patches and explores the subgroup structures within the same group, which makes the sparse residual model have better interpretation furthermore, results in high-quality restored images. Extensive experimental results on two typical image restoration tasks (image denoising and deblocking) demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms many other popular or state-of-the-art image restoration methods
ADDRESSING GEOGRAPHICAL CHALLENGES IN THE BIG DATA ERA UTILIZING CLOUD COMPUTING
Processing, mining and analyzing big data adds significant value towards solving previously unverified research questions or improving our ability to understand problems in geographical sciences. This dissertation contributes to developing a solution that supports researchers who may not otherwise have access to traditional high-performance computing resources so they benefit from the “big data” era, and implement big geographical research in ways that have not been previously possible. Using approaches from the fields of geographic information science, remote sensing and computer science, this dissertation addresses three major challenges in big geographical research: 1) how to exploit cloud computing to implement a universal scalable solution to classify multi-sourced remotely sensed imagery datasets with high efficiency; 2) how to overcome the missing data issue in land use land cover studies with a high-performance framework on the cloud through the use of available auxiliary datasets; and 3) the design considerations underlying a universal massive scale voxel geographical simulation model to implement complex geographical systems simulation using a three dimensional spatial perspective. This dissertation implements an in-memory distributed remotely sensed imagery classification framework on the cloud using both unsupervised and supervised classifiers, and classifies remotely sensed imagery datasets of the Suez Canal area, Egypt and Inner Mongolia, China under different cloud environments. This dissertation also implements and tests a cloud-based gap filling model with eleven auxiliary datasets in biophysical and social-economics in Inner Mongolia, China. This research also extends a voxel-based Cellular Automata model using graph theory and develops this model as a massive scale voxel geographical simulation framework to simulate dynamic processes, such as air pollution particles dispersal on cloud