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Sparse unmixing (SU) algorithms use the existing spectral library as prior knowledge to analyze the endmembers and estimate abundance maps. The majority of SU algorithms use loss functions based on the $L_{2,1}$ -norm or $F$ -norm to minimize reconstruction error. They have different advantages and shortcomings. In short, $F$ -norm has a differentiable characteristic, and it is easy to minimize as a loss function. However, it is very sensitive to heavy noise and outliers. While the $L_{2,1}$ -norm emphasizes the reconstruction error on each band and is robust to noise with different intensities in different bands. But the $L_{2,1}$ -norm is nondifferentiable at zero-point. This article introduces an adaptive loss function based on the $\sigma $ -norm for SU, which combines the advantages of the $L_{2,1}$ -norm and $F$ -norm. The adaptive loss function is related to a nonnegative parameter $\sigma $. By adjusting the parameter $\sigma $ , the adaptive loss function can approach the $F$ -norm or $L_{2,1}$ -norm. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to apply an adaptive loss function to SU. Moreover, the adaptive loss function is globally differentiable, and we propose an optimization algorithm for the adaptive loss function and verify its convergence. Experiments on real-world and synthetic HSIs show that the adaptive loss function effectively enhances the performance of the SU algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sparse unmixing (SU) is a semisupervised learning problem, which performs abundance estimation when a spectral library is given. In this way, the essence of SU is to select the most suitable subset from the spectral library for representing all mixed pixels. Many SU methods adopt joint-sparse and low-rank constraints to guide the abundance estimation. However, the spatial correlation learning in these algorithms is not accurate enough, which seriously affects the unmixing performance. Besides, most pruning-based unmixing methods suffer from complicated pruning strategies and ignore the relationship between the spectral library and mixed pixels. This article proposes a reweighted low-rank and joint-sparse unmixing approach, which combines an effective pruning strategy (RLSU-LP). The RLSU-LP approach consists of rough unmixing stage, library pruning, and fine-tuning unmixing stage. First, the proposed method utilizes image segmentation to obtain different homogeneous regions, i.e., superpixels. A confidence index is introduced to describe the superpixel homogeneity, which is conducive to learning the meticulous spatial correlation. The RLSU-LP method reasonably relaxes or tightens the sparse and low-rank constraints of the abundance matrix by using the confidence index. Furthermore, a supervised library pruning strategy is proposed, which aims to eliminate the inactive endmembers by considering the contribution of representing mixed pixels. Experiments on the synthesized dataset and authentic hyperspectral images verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral unmixing is an essential research topic for spectral data analysis due to the existence of mixed pixels. Recently, many methods based on sparse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) have been widely used for unmixing by incorporating similarity preserving. However, most of them conduct the similarity learning and unmixing by using two separate steps, which may lead to the case that the learned similarity matrix is not the optimal one for unmixing. Thus, the performance of unmixing would be influenced and become undesirable. To alleviate this problem, we propose an adaptive relationship preserving-based sparse NMF (ARP-NMF) for hyperspectral unmixing. Typically, we regard similarity learning and unmixing as an alternative optimization process. During this process, the learned similarity weights and unmixing results can be mutually improved. Thus, our proposed method can learn the optimal similarity weights for unmixing and obtain better generalization ability for different hyperspectral images than traditional methods. Moreover, by using the spectral and spatial local structure, our ARP-NMF method effectively preserves structure consistency between pixels and abundances. Experimental results both on the synthetic data and the real data reveal that our proposed method outperforms several representative sparse NMF-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the inconsistent imaging environment, the styles of multitemporal multispectral images (MSIs) are quite different, such as image brightness and transparency. For multitemporal MSIs with different styles, the “same object with different spectra” problem is one of the biggest challenges in change detection. To overcome the challenge, a novel unsupervised spatial–spectral feature learning (FL) framework based on style transformation (ST) (called STFL-CD) is proposed for MSI change detection in this article. For dual-temporal MSIs, the proposed STFl-CD algorithm consists of two phases: ST and spatial–spectral FL. Since the image styles are inconsistent under different imaging environments, the first innovation is to transform the image styles through unmixing and reconstruction. Through ST, the challenge of the “same object with different spectra” problem will be reduced fundamentally. By introducing the attention mechanism, the other innovation is to extract the joint spectral–spatial change features based on a 3-D convolutional neural network with spatial and channel attention. In addition, for multitemporal MSIs, a multitemporal version STFL-CD (MT-STFL-CD) framework is designed based on a recurrent neural network to learn the correlation features between multitemporal remote sensing images. Both of the visual and quantitative results on the real MSI datasets indicate that the proposed unsupervised STFL-CD frameworks have significant advantages on multitemporal MSI change detection. In particular, the performance of the proposed unsupervised STFL-CD algorithm is even comparable to that of the state-of-the-art supervised or semisupervised methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image captioning (RSIC), which aims at generating a well-formed sentence for a remote sensing image, has attracted more attention in recent years. The general framework for RSIC is the encoder–decoder architecture containing two submodels of encoder and decoder. Although the significant performance is obtained, the encoder–decoder architecture is a black-box model with a lack of explainability. To overcome this drawback, in this article, we propose a new explainable word–sentence framework for RSIC. The proposed word–sentence framework consists of two parts: word extractor and sentence generator, where the former extracts the valuable words in the given remote sensing image, while the latter organizes these words into a well-formed sentence. The proposed framework decomposes RSIC into a word classification task and a word sorting task, which is more in line with human intuitive understanding. On the basis of the word–sentence framework, some ablation experiments are conducted on the three public RSIC data sets of Sydney-captions, UCM-captions, and RSICD to explore the specific and effective network structures. In order to evaluate the proposed word–sentence framework objectively, we further conduct some comparative experiments on these three data sets and achieve comparable results in comparison with the encoder–decoder-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semisupervised band selection (BS) technique plays an important role in processing hyperspectral images (HSIs) because of its superiority of using the limited labeled data and plentiful unlabeled data to select the discriminative and informative feature, which copes with the problem of high-dimensional and scare labeled samples of HSIs. Among semisupervised BS models, graph-based methods are superior to others in many situations and have received more and more attention. However, traditional graph-based models construct a similarity matrix and select valuable bands independently. The similarity matrix remains constant, which will damage the local manifold structure and lead to a suboptimal result. To solve this problem, we propose a semisupervised band selection with an optimal graph (BSOG) approach, which performs BS and local structure learning simultaneously. Instead of fixing the input similarity matrix, the similarity matrix is updated constantly to learn a better local structure. Besides, the learned similarity matrix is adaptive. Then, the optimal band subset can be selected by analyzing the obtained projection matrix $\boldsymbol W$. An efficient and simple optimization algorithm is proposed to solve this model. Experiments on four real HSIs data validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image super-resolution (SR) methods based on deep learning have achieved significant progress recently. However, previous methods lack the joint analysis between spectrum and horizontal or vertical direction. Besides, when both 2D and 3D convolution are in the network, the existing models cannot effectively combine the two. To address these issues, in this article, we propose a novel hyperspectral image SR method by exploring the relationship between 2D/3D convolution (ERCSR). Our method alternately employs 2D and 3D units to solve the problem of structural redundancy by sharing spatial information during reconstruction for existing model, which can enhance the learning ability of 2D spatial domain. Importantly, compared with the network using 3D units, i.e., 2D units are replaced by 3D units, it can not only reduce the size of the model but also improve the performance of the model. Furthermore, to exploit the spectrum fully, the split adjacent spatial and spectral convolution (SAEC) is designed to parallelly explore information between spectrum and horizontal or vertical direction in space. Experiments on widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art SR algorithms across different scales in terms of quantitative and qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of a low-spatial-resolution hyperspectral image (HSI) (LR-HSI) with its corresponding high-spatial-resolution multispectral image (MSI) (HR-MSI) to reconstruct a high-spatial-resolution HSI (HR-HSI) has been a significant subject in recent years. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to achieve the cross-mode information fusion of spatial mode and spectral mode when reconstructing HR-HSI for the existing methods. In this article, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), an interpretable spatial–spectral reconstruction network (SSR-NET) is proposed for more efficient HSI and MSI fusion. More specifically, the proposed SSR-NET is a physical straightforward model that consists of three components: 1) cross-mode message inserting (CMMI); this operation can produce the preliminary fused HR-HSI, preserving the most valuable information of LR-HSI and HR-MSI; 2) spatial reconstruction network (SpatRN); the SpatRN concentrates on reconstructing the lost spatial information of LR-HSI with the guidance of spatial edge loss (Lspat); and 3) spectral reconstruction network (SpecRN); the SpecRN pays attention to reconstruct the lost spectral information of HR-MSI under the constraint of spatial edge loss ({Lspec). Comparative experiments are conducted on six HSI data sets of Urban, Pavia University (PU), Pavia Center (PC), Botswana, Indian Pines (IP), and Washington DC Mall (WDCM), and the proposed SSR-NET achieves the superior or competitive results in comparison with seven state-of-the-art methods. The code of SSR-NET is available at https://github.com/hw2hwei/SSRNET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, remote sensing image captioning (RSIC) has drawn an increasing attention. In this field, the encoder–decoder-based methods have become the mainstream due to their excellent performance. In the encoder–decoder framework, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to encode a remote sensing image into a semantic feature vector, and a sequence model such as long short-term memory (LSTM) is subsequently adopted to generate a content-related caption based on the feature vector. During the traditional training stage, the probability of the target word at each time step is forcibly optimized to 1 by the cross entropy (CE) loss. However, because of the variability and ambiguity of possible image captions, the target word could be replaced by other words like its synonyms, and therefore, such an optimization strategy would result in the overfitting of the network. In this article, we explore the overfitting phenomenon in the RSIC caused by CE loss and correspondingly propose a new truncation cross entropy (TCE) loss, aiming to alleviate the overfitting problem. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, extensive comparison experiments are performed on three public RSIC data sets, including UCM-captions, Sydney-captions, and RSICD. The state-of-the-art result of Sydney-captions and RSICD and the competitive results of UCM-captions achieved by TCE loss demonstrate that the proposed method is beneficial to RSIC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral images can provide dozens to hundreds of continuous spectral bands, so the richness of information has been greatly improved. However, these bands lead to increasing complexity of data processing, and the redundancy of adjacent bands is large. Recently, although many band selection methods have been proposed, this task is rarely handled through the context information of the whole spectral bands. Moreover, the scholars mainly focus on the different numbers of selected bands to explain the influence by accuracy measures, neglecting how many bands to choose is appropriate. To tackle these issues, we propose a fast neighborhood grouping method for hyperspectral band selection (FNGBS). The hyperspectral image cube in space is partitioned into several groups using coarse-fine strategy. By doing so, it effectively mines the context information in a large spectrum range. Compared with most algorithms, the proposed method can obtain the most relevant and informative bands simultaneously as subset in accordance with two factors, such as local density and information entropy. In addition, our method can also automatically determine the minimum number of recommended bands by determinantal point process. Extensive experimental results on benchmark data sets demonstrate the proposed FNGBS achieves satisfactory performance against state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of hyperspectral (HS) and multispectral (MS) images designed to obtain high-resolution HS (HRHS) images is a very challenging work. A series of solutions has been proposed in recent years. However, the similarity in the structure of the HS image has not been fully used. In this article, we present a novel HS and MS image-fusion method based on nonlocal low-rank tensor approximation and sparse representation. Specifically, the HS image and the MS image are considered the spatially and spectrally degraded versions of the HRHS image, respectively. Then, the nonlocal low-rank constraint term is adopted in order to form the nonlocal similarity and the spatial–spectral correlation. Meanwhile, we add the sparse constraint term to describe the sparsity of abundance. Thus, the proposed fusion model is established and its optimization is solved by alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The experimental results on three synthetic data sets and one real data set show the advantages of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years making use of deep networks, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), classifying hyperspectral images has progressed significantly and gained increasing attention. In spite of being successful, these networks need an adequate supply of labeled training instances for supervised learning, which, however, is quite costly to collect. On the other hand, unlabeled data can be accessed in almost arbitrary amounts. Hence it would be conceptually of great interest to explore networks that are able to exploit labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously for hyperspectral image classification. In this article, we propose a novel graph-based semisupervised network called nonlocal graph convolutional network (nonlocal GCN). Unlike existing CNNs and RNNs that receive pixels or patches of a hyperspectral image as inputs, this network takes the whole image (including both labeled and unlabeled data) in. More specifically, a nonlocal graph is first calculated. Given this graph representation, a couple of graph convolutional layers are used to extract features. Finally, the semisupervised learning of the network is done by using a cross-entropy error over all labeled instances. Note that the nonlocal GCN is end-to-end trainable. We demonstrate in extensive experiments that compared with state-of-the-art spectral classifiers and spectral–spatial classification networks, the nonlocal GCN is able to offer competitive results and high-quality classification maps (with fine boundaries and without noisy scattered points of misclassification). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Band selection is one of the most important technique in the reduction of hyperspectral image (HSI). Different from traditional feature selection problem, an important characteristic of it is that there is usually strong correlation between neighboring bands, that is, bands with close indexes. Aiming to fully exploit this prior information, a novel band selection method called optimal neighborhood reconstruction (ONR) is proposed. In ONR, band selection is considered as a combinatorial optimization problem. It evaluates a band combination by assessing its ability to reconstruct the original data, and applies a noise reducer to minimize the influence of noisy bands. Instead of using some approximate algorithms, ONR exploits a recurrence relation that underlies the optimization target to obtain the optimal solution in an efficient way. Besides, we develop a parameter selection approach to automatically determine the parameter of ONR, ensuring it is adaptable to different data sets. In experiments, ONR is compared with some state-of-the-art methods on six HSI data sets. The results demonstrate that ONR is more effective and robust than the others in most of the cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) has drawn a significant attention of late due to its importance in many military and civilian applications. In this article, a fast hyperspectral anomaly detector that combines multiple features and isolation forest is proposed. This approach, which is based on the assumption that the anomalous pixels are more susceptible to isolation than the background pixels, consists of two main parts. First, the spectral, Gabor, extended morphological profile (EMP) and extended multiattribute profile (EMAP) features are extracted from the hyperspectral image (HSI). Next, the isolation forest of each feature is constructed using the subsampling strategy. This combination of multiple features can exploit both the spectral and spatial information of the HSI, thereby improving the anomaly detection performance significantly. Compared with eight state-of-the-art HAD methods, the experimental results on four real hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that the performance of our proposed approach is quite competitive in terms of detection accuracy and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sparse unmixing has become a popular tool for hyperspectral imagery interpretation. It refers to finding the optimal subset of a spectral library to reconstruct the image data and further estimate the proportions of different materials. Recently, multi-objective based sparse unmixing methods have presented promising performance because of their advantages in addressing combinatorial problems. A spectral and multi-objective based sparse unmixing (SMoSU) algorithm was proposed in our previous work, which solves the decision-making problem well. However, it does not show outstanding advantages in strong noise cases. To solve the problem, in this paper, SMoSU is improved based on the estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs). The machine learning based EDAs have been a reliable approach in solving multi-objective problems. However, most of them are for special problems and relatively weak in theoretical foundations. Thus, it is unreliable to extend it directly to sparse unmixing. Here, we improve EDA on the basis of classification and propose a classification-based model for individual generating under the framework of SMoSU (CM-MoSU). In CM-MoSU, the whole population is divided to be positive and negative. Then, the macroinformation of positive individuals is used to guide the generation of new individuals. Therefore, the optimization task could pay more attention to the feasible space with high quality. Moreover, some theoretical analyses are presented to prove the reliability of CM-MoSU. In experiments, several state-of-the-art sparse unmixing algorithms are compared. Both synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CM-MoSU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is very important in remote sensing applications. However, most graph-based clustering models are not suitable for dealing with large HSI due to their computational bottlenecks: the construction of the similarity matrix $\boldsymbol {W}$ , the eigenvalue decomposition of the graph Laplacian matrix $\boldsymbol {L}$ , and $k$ -means or other discretization procedures. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach, scalable graph-based clustering with nonnegative relaxation (SGCNR), to cluster the large HSI. The proposed SGCNR algorithm first constructs an anchor graph and then adds the nonnegative relaxation term. With this, the computational complexity can be reduced to $O(nd\log m+nK^{2}+nKc+K^{3})$ , compared with traditional graph-based clustering algorithms that need at least $O(n^{2}d+n^{2}K)$ or $O(n^{2}d+n^{3})$ , where $n$ , $d$ , $m$ , $K$ , and $c$ are, respectively, the number of samples, features, anchors, classes, and nearest neighbors. In addition, the SGCNR algorithm can directly obtain the clustering indicators, without resort to $k$ -means or other discretization procedures as traditional graph-based clustering algorithms have to do. Experimental results on several HSI data sets have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed SGCNR algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene classification of remote sensing images has drawn great attention because of its wide applications. In this paper, with the guidance of the human visual system (HVS), we explore the attention mechanism and propose a novel end-to-end attention recurrent convolutional network (ARCNet) for scene classification. It can learn to focus selectively on some key regions or locations and just process them at high-level features, thereby discarding the noncritical information and promoting the classification performance. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design a novel recurrent attention structure to squeeze high-level semantic and spatial features into several simplex vectors for the reduction of learning parameters. Second, an end-to-end network named ARCNet is proposed to adaptively select a series of attention regions and then to generate powerful predictions by learning to process them sequentially. Third, we construct a new data set named OPTIMAL-31, which contains more categories than popular data sets and gives researchers an extra platform to validate their algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our model makes great promotion in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 low-dimensional subspaces embedded in original data. However, there are still two drawbacks for LRR. First, the 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 LRR (LSLRR) model is proposed for HSI classification. To overcome the above-mentioned limitations, we present locality constraint criterion and structure preserving strategy 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. In addition, we propose a structural 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 data sets. And the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSLRR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Band selection, by choosing a set of representative bands in a hyperspectral image, is an effective method to reduce the redundant information without compromising the original contents. Recently, various unsupervised band selection methods have been proposed, but most of them are based on approximation algorithms which can only obtain suboptimal solutions toward a specific objective function. This paper focuses on clustering-based band selection and proposes a new framework to solve the above dilemma, claiming the following contributions: 1) an optimal clustering framework, which can obtain the optimal clustering result for a particular form of objective function under a reasonable constraint; 2) a rank on clusters strategy, which provides an effective criterion to select bands on existing clustering structure; and 3) an automatic method to determine the number of the required bands, which can better evaluate the distinctive information produced by certain number of bands. In experiments, the proposed algorithm is compared with some state-of-the-art competitors. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is robust and significantly outperforms the other methods on various data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change detection is an important technique providing insights to urban planning, resources monitoring, and environmental studies. For multispectral images, most semi-supervised change detection methods focus on improving the contribution of training samples hard to be classified to the trained classifier. However, hard training samples will weaken the discrimination of the training model for multispectral change detection. Besides, these methods only use the spectral information, while the limited spectral information cannot represent objects very well. In this paper, a method named as coarse-to-fine semi-supervised change detection is proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. First, a novel multiscale feature is exploited by concatenating the spectral vector of the pixel to be detected and its adjacent pixels by different scales. Second, the enhanced metric learning is proposed to acquire more discriminant metric by strengthening the contribution of training samples easy to be classified and weakening the contribution of training samples hard to be classified to the trained model. Finally, a coarse-to-fine strategy is adopted to detect testing samples from the viewpoint of distance metric and label information of neighborhood in spatial space. The coarse detection result obtained from the enhanced metric learning is used to guide the final detection. The effectiveness of our proposed method is verified on two real-life operating scenarios, Taizhou and Kunshan data sets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has better performance than those of other state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, notable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection. However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at https://github.com/201528014227051/RSICD_optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]