Search

The automatic detection of buried threats in ground penetrating radar (GPR) data is an active area of research due to GPR's ability to detect both metal and nonmetal subsurface objects. Recent work on algorithms designed to distinguish between threats and nonthreats in GPR data has utilized computer vision methods to advance the state-of-the-art detection and discrimination performance. Feature extractors, or descriptors, from the computer vision literature have exhibited excellent performance in representing 2-D GPR image patches and allow for robust classification of threats from nonthreats. This paper aims to perform a broad study of feature extraction methods in order to identify characteristics that lead to improved classification performance under controlled conditions. The results presented in this paper show that gradient-based features, such as the edge histogram descriptor and the scale invariant feature transform, provide the most robust performance across a large and varied data set. These results indicate that various techniques from the computer vision literature can be successfully applied to target detection in GPR data and that more advanced techniques from the computer vision literature may provide further performance improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a kernel-based feature selection method for the classification of hyperspectral images. The proposed method aims at selecting a subset of the original features that are both 1) relevant (discriminant) for the considered classification problem, i.e., preserve the functional relationship between input and output variables, and 2) invariant (stable) across different domains, i.e., minimize the data-set shift between the source and the target domains. Domains can be associated with hyperspectral images collected either on different geographical areas or on the same area at different times. We propose a novel measure of data-set shift for evaluating the domain stability, which computes the distance of the conditional distributions between the source and target domains in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Such a measure is defined on the basis of the kernel embeddings of the conditional distributions resulting in a nonparametric approach that does not require estimating the distribution of the classes. The adopted search strategy is based on a multiobjective optimization algorithm, which optimizes the two terms of the criterion function for the estimation of the Pareto-optimal solutions. This results in an effective approach of performing feature selection in a transfer learning setting. The experimental results obtained on two hyperspectral images show the effectiveness of the proposed method in selecting features with high generalization capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate tree-cover estimates are useful in deriving above-ground biomass density estimates from very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery data. Numerous algorithms have been designed to perform tree-cover delineation in high-to-coarse-resolution satellite imagery, but most of them do not scale to terabytes of data, typical in these VHR data sets. In this paper, we present an automated probabilistic framework for the segmentation and classification of 1-m VHR data as obtained from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) for deriving tree-cover estimates for the whole of Continental United States, using a high-performance computing architecture. The results from the classification and segmentation algorithms are then consolidated into a structured prediction framework using a discriminative undirected probabilistic graphical model based on conditional random field, which helps in capturing the higher order contextual dependence relations between neighboring pixels. Once the final probability maps are generated, the framework is updated and retrained by incorporating expert knowledge through the relabeling of misclassified image patches. This leads to a significant improvement in the true positive rates and reduction in false positive rates (FPRs). The tree-cover maps were generated for the state of California, which covers a total of 11 095 NAIP tiles and spans a total geographical area of 163 696 sq. miles. Our framework produced correct detection rates of around 88% for fragmented forests and 74% for urban tree-cover areas, with FPRs lower than 2% for both regions. Comparative studies with the National Land-Cover Data algorithm and the LiDAR high-resolution canopy height model showed the effectiveness of our algorithm for generating accurate high-resolution tree-cover maps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the great success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision, this paper proposes a complex-valued CNN (CV-CNN) specifically for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image interpretation. It utilizes both amplitude and phase information of complex SAR imagery. All elements of CNN including input-output layer, convolution layer, activation function, and pooling layer are extended to the complex domain. Moreover, a complex backpropagation algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent is derived for CV-CNN training. The proposed CV-CNN is then tested on the typical polarimetric SAR image classification task which classifies each pixel into known terrain types via supervised training. Experiments with the benchmark data sets of Flevoland and Oberpfaffenhofen show that the classification error can be further reduced if employing CV-CNN instead of conventional real-valued CNN with the same degrees of freedom. The performance of CV-CNN is comparable to that of existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the large amount of spatial and spectral information contained in hyperspectral image (HSI), feature description of HSI has attracted widespread concern in recent years. Existing deep learning-based HSI feature description algorithms require a large number of training samples and have poor interpretability. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient HSI features description algorithm with interpretability based on machine learning. Local binary pattern (LBP) is a classical descriptor used to extract the local spatial texture features of images, which has been widely applied to image feature description and matching. However, the existing LBP algorithms for HSI are based on the single-dimensional description, which leads to the limitations on the expression of spatial–spectral information. Therefore, a multidimensional LBP (MDLBP) based on Clifford algebra for HSI is proposed in this article, which is able to extract spatial–spectral feature from multiple dimensions. First, with the theory of the Clifford algebra, a new representation of HSI including spatial and spectral information is built. Second, the geometric relationship between the local geometry of HSI in Clifford algebra space is calculated to realize the local multidimensional description of the local spatial–spectral information. Finally, a novel LBP coding algorithm for HSI is implemented based on the local multidimensional description to calculate the feature descriptor of HSI. The experimental results on HSI classification show that our proposed MDLBP algorithm can achieve higher accuracy than the representative spatial–spectral features and the existing LBP algorithms, especially in the scenery of small-scale training samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]