Hierarchical Bayesian image analysis: from low-level modeling to robust supervised learning

Within a supervised classification framework, labeled data are used to learn classifier parameters. Prior to that, it is generally required to perform dimensionality reduction via feature extraction. These preprocessing steps have motivated numerous research works aiming at recovering latent variables in an unsupervised context. This paper proposes a unified framework to perform classification and low-level modeling jointly. The main objective is to use the estimated latent variables as features for classification and to incorporate simultaneously supervised information to help latent variable extraction. The proposed hierarchical Bayesian model is divided into three stages: a first low-level modeling stage to estimate latent variables, a second stage clustering these features into statistically homogeneous groups and a last classification stage exploiting the (possibly badly) labeled data. Performance of the model is assessed in the specific context of hyperspectral image interpretation, unifying two standard analysis techniques, namely unmixing and classification

Simultaneous Spectral-Spatial Feature Selection and Extraction for Hyperspectral Images

In hyperspectral remote sensing data mining, it is important to take into account of both spectral and spatial information, such as the spectral signature, texture feature and morphological property, to improve the performances, e.g., the image classification accuracy. In a feature representation point of view, a nature approach to handle this situation is to concatenate the spectral and spatial features into a single but high dimensional vector and then apply a certain dimension reduction technique directly on that concatenated vector before feed it into the subsequent classifier. However, multiple features from various domains definitely have different physical meanings and statistical properties, and thus such concatenation hasn't efficiently explore the complementary properties among different features, which should benefit for boost the feature discriminability. Furthermore, it is also difficult to interpret the transformed results of the concatenated vector. Consequently, finding a physically meaningful consensus low dimensional feature representation of original multiple features is still a challenging task. In order to address the these issues, we propose a novel feature learning framework, i.e., the simultaneous spectral-spatial feature selection and extraction algorithm, for hyperspectral images spectral-spatial feature representation and classification. Specifically, the proposed method learns a latent low dimensional subspace by projecting the spectral-spatial feature into a common feature space, where the complementary information has been effectively exploited, and simultaneously, only the most significant original features have been transformed. Encouraging experimental results on three public available hyperspectral remote sensing datasets confirm that our proposed method is effective and efficient

Optimized kernel minimum noise fraction transformation for hyperspectral image classification

This paper presents an optimized kernel minimum noise fraction transformation (OKMNF) for feature extraction of hyperspectral imagery. The proposed approach is based on the kernel minimum noise fraction (KMNF) transformation, which is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method. KMNF can map the original data into a higher dimensional feature space and provide a small number of quality features for classification and some other post processing. Noise estimation is an important component in KMNF. It is often estimated based on a strong relationship between adjacent pixels. However, hyperspectral images have limited spatial resolution and usually have a large number of mixed pixels, which make the spatial information less reliable for noise estimation. It is the main reason that KMNF generally shows unstable performance in feature extraction for classification. To overcome this problem, this paper exploits the use of a more accurate noise estimation method to improve KMNF. We propose two new noise estimation methods accurately. Moreover, we also propose a framework to improve noise estimation, where both spectral and spatial de-correlation are exploited. Experimental results, conducted using a variety of hyperspectral images, indicate that the proposed OKMNF is superior to some other related dimensionality reduction methods in most cases. Compared to the conventional KMNF, the proposed OKMNF benefits significant improvements in overall classification accuracy

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: Theories, Tools and Challenges for the Community

In recent years, deep learning (DL), a re-branding of neural networks (NNs), has risen to the top in numerous areas, namely computer vision (CV), speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. Whereas remote sensing (RS) possesses a number of unique challenges, primarily related to sensors and applications, inevitably RS draws from many of the same theories as CV; e.g., statistics, fusion, and machine learning, to name a few. This means that the RS community should be aware of, if not at the leading edge of, of advancements like DL. Herein, we provide the most comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art RS DL research. We also review recent new developments in the DL field that can be used in DL for RS. Namely, we focus on theories, tools and challenges for the RS community. Specifically, we focus on unsolved challenges and opportunities as it relates to (i) inadequate data sets, (ii) human-understandable solutions for modelling physical phenomena, (iii) Big Data, (iv) non-traditional heterogeneous data sources, (v) DL architectures and learning algorithms for spectral, spatial and temporal data, (vi) transfer learning, (vii) an improved theoretical understanding of DL systems, (viii) high barriers to entry, and (ix) training and optimizing the DL.Comment: 64 pages, 411 references. To appear in Journal of Applied Remote Sensin

Bidirectional-Convolutional LSTM Based Spectral-Spatial Feature Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

This paper proposes a novel deep learning framework named bidirectional-convolutional long short term memory (Bi-CLSTM) network to automatically learn the spectral-spatial feature from hyperspectral images (HSIs). In the network, the issue of spectral feature extraction is considered as a sequence learning problem, and a recurrent connection operator across the spectral domain is used to address it. Meanwhile, inspired from the widely used convolutional neural network (CNN), a convolution operator across the spatial domain is incorporated into the network to extract the spatial feature. Besides, to sufficiently capture the spectral information, a bidirectional recurrent connection is proposed. In the classification phase, the learned features are concatenated into a vector and fed to a softmax classifier via a fully-connected operator. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed Bi-CLSTM framework, we compare it with several state-of-the-art methods, including the CNN framework, on three widely used HSIs. The obtained results show that Bi-CLSTM can improve the classification performance as compared to other methods