A Multimodal Feature Selection Method for Remote Sensing Data Analysis Based on Double Graph Laplacian Diagonalization

When dealing with multivariate remotely sensed records collected by multiple sensors, an accurate selection of information at the data, feature, or decision level is instrumental in improving the scenes’ characterization. This will also enhance the system’s efficiency and provide more details on modeling the physical phenomena occurring on the Earth’s surface. In this article, we introduce a flexible and efficient method based on graph Laplacians for information selection at different levels of data fusion. The proposed approach combines data structure and information content to address the limitations of existing graph-Laplacian-based methods in dealing with heterogeneous datasets. Moreover, it adapts the selection to each homogenous area of the considered images according to their underlying properties. Experimental tests carried out on several multivariate remote sensing datasets show the consistency of the proposed approach

PSSA: PCA-domain superpixelwise singular spectral analysis for unsupervised hyperspectral image classification.

Although supervised classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) has achieved success in remote sensing, its applications in real scenarios are often constrained, mainly due to the insufficiently available or lack of labelled data. As a result, unsupervised HSI classification based on data clustering is highly desired, yet it generally suffers from high computational cost and low classification accuracy, especially in large datasets. To tackle these challenges, a novel unsupervised spatial-spectral HSI classification method is proposed. By combining the entropy rate superpixel segmentation (ERS), superpixel-based principal component analysis (PCA), and PCA-domain 2D singular spectral analysis (SSA), both the efficacy and efficiency of feature extraction are improved, followed by the anchor-based graph clustering (AGC) for effective classification. Experiments on three publicly available and five self-collected aerial HSI datasets have fully demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed PCA-domain superpixelwise SSA (PSSA) method, with a gain of 15–20% in terms of the overall accuracy, in comparison to a few state-of-the-art methods. In addition, as an extra outcome, the HSI dataset we acquired is provided freely online

SpaSSA: superpixelwise adaptive SSA for unsupervised spatial-spectral feature extraction in hyperspectral image.

Singular spectral analysis (SSA) has recently been successfully applied to feature extraction in hyperspectral image (HSI), including conventional (1-D) SSA in spectral domain and 2-D SSA in spatial domain. However, there are some drawbacks, such as sensitivity to the window size, high computational complexity under a large window, and failing to extract joint spectral-spatial features. To tackle these issues, in this article, we propose superpixelwise adaptive SSA (SpaSSA), that is superpixelwise adaptive SSA for exploiting local spatial information of HSI. The extraction of local (instead of global) features, particularly in HSI, can be more effective for characterizing the objects within an image. In SpaSSA, conventional SSA and 2-D SSA are combined and adaptively applied to each superpixel derived from an oversegmented HSI. According to the size of the derived superpixels, either SSA or 2-D singular spectrum analysis (2D-SSA) is adaptively applied for feature extraction, where the embedding window in 2D-SSA is also adaptive to the size of the superpixel. Experimental results on the three datasets have shown that the proposed SpaSSA outperforms both SSA and 2D-SSA in terms of classification accuracy and computational complexity. By combining SpaSSA with the principal component analysis (SpaSSA-PCA), the accuracy of land-cover analysis can be further improved, outperforming several state-of-the-art approaches

Graph-based Data Modeling and Analysis for Data Fusion in Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging provides the capability of increased sensitivity and discrimination over traditional imaging methods by combining standard digital imaging with spectroscopic methods. For each individual pixel in a hyperspectral image (HSI), a continuous spectrum is sampled as the spectral reflectance/radiance signature to facilitate identification of ground cover and surface material. The abundant spectrum knowledge allows all available information from the data to be mined. The superior qualities within hyperspectral imaging allow wide applications such as mineral exploration, agriculture monitoring, and ecological surveillance, etc. The processing of massive high-dimensional HSI datasets is a challenge since many data processing techniques have a computational complexity that grows exponentially with the dimension. Besides, a HSI dataset may contain a limited number of degrees of freedom due to the high correlations between data points and among the spectra. On the other hand, merely taking advantage of the sampled spectrum of individual HSI data point may produce inaccurate results due to the mixed nature of raw HSI data, such as mixed pixels, optical interferences and etc. Fusion strategies are widely adopted in data processing to achieve better performance, especially in the field of classification and clustering. There are mainly three types of fusion strategies, namely low-level data fusion, intermediate-level feature fusion, and high-level decision fusion. Low-level data fusion combines multi-source data that is expected to be complementary or cooperative. Intermediate-level feature fusion aims at selection and combination of features to remove redundant information. Decision level fusion exploits a set of classifiers to provide more accurate results. The fusion strategies have wide applications including HSI data processing. With the fast development of multiple remote sensing modalities, e.g. Very High Resolution (VHR) optical sensors, LiDAR, etc., fusion of multi-source data can in principal produce more detailed information than each single source. On the other hand, besides the abundant spectral information contained in HSI data, features such as texture and shape may be employed to represent data points from a spatial perspective. Furthermore, feature fusion also includes the strategy of removing redundant and noisy features in the dataset. One of the major problems in machine learning and pattern recognition is to develop appropriate representations for complex nonlinear data. In HSI processing, a particular data point is usually described as a vector with coordinates corresponding to the intensities measured in the spectral bands. This vector representation permits the application of linear and nonlinear transformations with linear algebra to find an alternative representation of the data. More generally, HSI is multi-dimensional in nature and the vector representation may lose the contextual correlations. Tensor representation provides a more sophisticated modeling technique and a higher-order generalization to linear subspace analysis. In graph theory, data points can be generalized as nodes with connectivities measured from the proximity of a local neighborhood. The graph-based framework efficiently characterizes the relationships among the data and allows for convenient mathematical manipulation in many applications, such as data clustering, feature extraction, feature selection and data alignment. In this thesis, graph-based approaches applied in the field of multi-source feature and data fusion in remote sensing area are explored. We will mainly investigate the fusion of spatial, spectral and LiDAR information with linear and multilinear algebra under graph-based framework for data clustering and classification problems

Locality and Structure Regularized Low Rank Representation for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, which aims to assign an accurate label for hyperspectral pixels, has drawn great interest in recent years. Although low rank representation (LRR) has been used to classify HSI, its ability to segment each class from the whole HSI data has not been exploited fully yet. LRR has a good capacity to capture the underlying lowdimensional subspaces embedded in original data. However, there are still two drawbacks for LRR. First, LRR does not consider the local geometric structure within data, which makes the local correlation among neighboring data easily ignored. Second, the representation obtained by solving LRR is not discriminative enough to separate different data. In this paper, a novel locality and structure regularized low rank representation (LSLRR) model is proposed for HSI classification. To overcome the above limitations, we present locality constraint criterion (LCC) and structure preserving strategy (SPS) to improve the classical LRR. Specifically, we introduce a new distance metric, which combines both spatial and spectral features, to explore the local similarity of pixels. Thus, the global and local structures of HSI data can be exploited sufficiently. Besides, we propose a structure constraint to make the representation have a near block-diagonal structure. This helps to determine the final classification labels directly. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three popular HSI datasets. And the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSLRR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, TGRS201