State-of-the-art and gaps for deep learning on limited training data in remote sensing

Deep learning usually requires big data, with respect to both volume and variety. However, most remote sensing applications only have limited training data, of which a small subset is labeled. Herein, we review three state-of-the-art approaches in deep learning to combat this challenge. The first topic is transfer learning, in which some aspects of one domain, e.g., features, are transferred to another domain. The next is unsupervised learning, e.g., autoencoders, which operate on unlabeled data. The last is generative adversarial networks, which can generate realistic looking data that can fool the likes of both a deep learning network and human. The aim of this article is to raise awareness of this dilemma, to direct the reader to existing work and to highlight current gaps that need solving.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.0030

DALF: An AI Enabled Adversarial Framework for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral image classification is very complex and challenging process. However, with deep neural networks like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with explicit dimensionality reduction, the capability of classifier is greatly increased. However, there is still problem with sufficient training samples. In this paper, we overcome this problem by proposing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based framework named Deep Adversarial Learning Framework (DALF) that exploits deep autoencoder for dimensionality reduction, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for generating new Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) samples that are to be verified by a discriminator in a non-cooperative game setting besides using aclassifier. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for both generator and discriminator while classifier role is played by Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Network (NN). An algorithm named Generative Model based Hybrid Approach for HSI Classification (GMHA-HSIC) which drives the functionality of the proposed framework is proposed. The success of DALF in accurate classification is largely dependent on the synthesis and labelling of spectra on regular basis. The synthetic samples made with an iterative process and being verified by discriminator result in useful spectra. By training GAN with associated deep learning models, the framework leverages classification performance. Our experimental results revealed that the proposed framework has potential to improve the state of the art besides having an effective data augmentation strategy

Image Processing and Machine Learning for Hyperspectral Unmixing: An Overview and the HySUPP Python Package

Spectral pixels are often a mixture of the pure spectra of the materials, called endmembers, due to the low spatial resolution of hyperspectral sensors, double scattering, and intimate mixtures of materials in the scenes. Unmixing estimates the fractional abundances of the endmembers within the pixel. Depending on the prior knowledge of endmembers, linear unmixing can be divided into three main groups: supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised (blind) linear unmixing. Advances in Image processing and machine learning substantially affected unmixing. This paper provides an overview of advanced and conventional unmixing approaches. Additionally, we draw a critical comparison between advanced and conventional techniques from the three categories. We compare the performance of the unmixing techniques on three simulated and two real datasets. The experimental results reveal the advantages of different unmixing categories for different unmixing scenarios. Moreover, we provide an open-source Python-based package available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/HySUPP to reproduce the results

Deep Semisupervised Teacher-Student Model Based on Label Propagation for Sea Ice Classification

In this article, we propose a novelteacher–student-based label propagation deep semisupervised learning (TSLP-SSL) method for sea ice classification based on Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar data. For sea ice classification, labeling the data precisely is very time consuming and requires expert knowledge. Our method efficiently learns sea ice characteristics from a limited number of labeled samples and a relatively large number of unlabeled samples. Therefore, our method addresses the key challenge of using a limited number of precisely labeled samples to achieve generalization capability by discovering the underlying sea ice characteristics also from unlabeled data. We perform experimental analysis considering a standard dataset consisting of properly labeled sea ice data spanning over different time slots of the year. Both qualitative and quantitative results obtained on this dataset show that our proposed TSLP-SSL method outperforms deep supervised and semisupervised reference methods