A new kernel method for hyperspectral image feature extraction

Hyperspectral image provides abundant spectral information for remote discrimination of subtle differences in ground covers. However, the increasing spectral dimensions, as well as the information redundancy, make the analysis and interpretation of hyperspectral images a challenge. Feature extraction is a very important step for hyperspectral image processing. Feature extraction methods aim at reducing the dimension of data, while preserving as much information as possible. Particularly, nonlinear feature extraction methods (e.g. kernel minimum noise fraction (KMNF) transformation) have been reported to benefit many applications of hyperspectral remote sensing, due to their good preservation of high-order structures of the original data. However, conventional KMNF or its extensions have some limitations on noise fraction estimation during the feature extraction, and this leads to poor performances for post-applications. This paper proposes a novel nonlinear feature extraction method for hyperspectral images. Instead of estimating noise fraction by the nearest neighborhood information (within a sliding window), the proposed method explores the use of image segmentation. The approach benefits both noise fraction estimation and information preservation, and enables a significant improvement for classification. Experimental results on two real hyperspectral images demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Compared to conventional KMNF, the improvements of the method on two hyperspectral image classification are 8 and 11%. This nonlinear feature extraction method can be also applied to other disciplines where high-dimensional data analysis is required

Electrical Transport Properties of Multilayered Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Films

An improved layer-by-layer vacuum filtration method was adopted for the fabrication of single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) films aiming at a series of SWCNT films with controllable thickness and density. The electrical transport properties of the multilayered SWCNT films have been investigated. With the constant film density, the decrease of the layer number of the SWCNT film results in an increase of the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR). SWCNT film with 95% metallic nanotubes has shown a lower TCR than that of the SWCNT films with a low percentage of metallic nanotubes. The effect of thermal annealing and subsequent acid (HNO3) treatment on the electrical properties of the SWCNT films has also been investigated

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

Hyperspectral and multispectral image fusion via tensor sparsity regularization

Hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution scheme based on HSI and multispectral image (MSI) fusion has been a prevalent research theme in remote sensing. However, most of the existing HSI-MSI fusion (HMF) methods adopt the sparsity prior across spatial or spectral domains via vectorizing hyperspectral cubes along a certain dimension, which results in the spatial or spectral informations distortion. Moreover, the current HMF works rarely pay attention to leveraging the nonlocal similar structure over spatial domain of the HSI. In this paper, we propose a new HSI-MSI fusion approach via tensor sparsity regularization which can encode essential spatial and spectral sparsity of an HSI. Specifically, we study how to utilize reasonably the sparsity of tensor to describe the spatialspectral correlation hidden in an HSI. Then, we resort to an efficient optimization strategy based on the alternative direction multiplier method (ADMM) for solving the resulting minimization problem. Experimental results on Pavia University data verify the merits of the proposed HMF algorithm

Adaptive distance-based band hierarchy (ADBH) for effective hyperspectral band selection.

Band selection has become a significant issue for the efficiency of the hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. Although many unsupervised band selection (UBS) approaches have been developed in the last decades, a flexible and robust method is still lacking. The lack of proper understanding of the HSI data structure has resulted in the inconsistency in the outcome of UBS. Besides, most of the UBS methods are either relying on complicated measurements or rather noise sensitive, which hinder the efficiency of the determined band subset. In this article, an adaptive distance-based band hierarchy (ADBH) clustering framework is proposed for UBS in HSI, which can help to avoid the noisy bands while reflecting the hierarchical data structure of HSI. With a tree hierarchy-based framework, we can acquire any number of band subset. By introducing a novel adaptive distance into the hierarchy, the similarity between bands and band groups can be computed straightforward while reducing the effect of noisy bands. Experiments on four datasets acquired from two HSI systems have fully validated the superiority of the proposed framework

Fusion of multi-scale hyperspectral and LiDAR features for tree species mapping

The added value of multiple data sources on tree species mapping has been widely analyzed. In particular, fusion of hyper-spectral (HS) and LiDAR sensors for forest applications is a very hot topic. In this paper, we exploit the use of multi-scale features to fuse HS and LiDAR data for tree species mapping. Hyperspectral data is obtained from the APEX sensor with 286 spectral bands. LiDAR data has been acquired with a TopoSys sensor Harrier 56 at full waveform. We generate multi-scale features on both HS and LiDAR data, by considering the diameter and the height layer of different tree species. Experimental results on a forested area in Belgium demonstrate the effectiveness of using multi-scale features for fusion of HS image and LiDAR data both visually and quantitatively