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In he past decade, object detection has achieved significant progress in natural images but not in aerial images, due to the massive variations in the scale and orientation of objects caused by the bird’s-eye view of aerial images. More importantly, the lack of large-scale benchmarks has become a major obstacle to the development of object detection in aerial images (ODAI). In this paper, we present a large-scale Dataset of Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA) and comprehensive baselines for ODAI. The proposed DOTA dataset contains 1,793,658 object instances of 18 categories of oriented-bounding-box annotations collected from 11,268 aerial images. Based on this large-scale and well-annotated dataset, we build baselines covering 10 state-of-the-art algorithms with over 70 configurations, where the speed and accuracy performances of each model have been evaluated. Furthermore, we provide a code library for ODAI and build a website for evaluating different algorithms. Previous challenges run on DOTA have attracted more than 1300 teams worldwide. We believe that the expanded large-scale DOTA dataset, the extensive baselines, the code library and the challenges can facilitate the designs of robust algorithms and reproducible research on the problem of object detection in aerial images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the limits of incident energy and hardware system, hyperspectral (HS) images always suffer from low spatial resolution, compared with multispectral (MS) or panchromatic (PAN) images. Therefore, image fusion has emerged as a useful technology that is able to combine the characteristics of high spectral and spatial resolutions of HS and PAN/MS images. In this paper, a novel HS and PAN image fusion method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. The proposed method incorporates the ideas of both hyper-sharpening and MS pan-sharpening techniques, thereby employing a two-stage cascaded CNN to reconstruct the anticipated high-resolution HS image. Technically, the proposed CNN architecture consists of two sub-networks, the detail injection sub-network and unmixing sub-network. The former aims at producing a latent high-resolution MS image, whereas the latter estimates the desired high-resolution abundance maps by exploring the spatial and spectral information of both HS and MS images. Moreover, two model-training fashions are presented in this paper for the sake of effectively training our network. Experiments on simulated and real remote sensing data demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the spatial resolution and spectral fidelity of HS image, and achieve better performance than some state-of-the-art HS pan-sharpening algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we design an Anomaly Detection (AD) framework for mobile data traffic, capable of identifying different types of anomalous events generated by flash crowds in metropolitan areas. We state the problem using a semi-supervised approach and exploit the great performance of different Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models to learn the temporal context of input sequences. Our proposal processes real traffic traces from the unencrypted LTE Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) of an operative network, gathered during an extensive measurement campaign in two major cities in Spain. The AD framework is designed to perform: i) a-posteriori analysis to understand users’ behavior and urban environment variations; ii) real-time analysis to automatically and on-the-fly alert urban anomalies; and iii) estimation of the duration of the periods identified as anomalous. Numerical results show the higher performance of our AD framework compared to classic AD algorithms and confirm that the proposed framework predicts anomalous behaviours with high accuracy and regardless of their cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic segmentation methods based on deep neural networks have achieved great success in recent years. However, training such deep neural networks relies heavily on a large number of images with accurate pixel-level labels, which requires a huge amount of human effort, especially for large-scale remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a point-based weakly supervised learning framework called the deep bilateral filtering network (DBFNet) for the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Compared with pixel-level labels, point annotations are usually sparse and cannot reveal the complete structure of the objects; they also lack boundary information, thus resulting in incomplete prediction within the object and the loss of object boundaries. To address these problems, we incorporate the bilateral filtering technique into deeply learned representations in two respects. First, since a target object contains smooth regions that always belong to the same category, we perform deep bilateral filtering (DBF) to filter the deep features by a nonlinear combination of nearby feature values, which encourages the nearby and similar features to become closer, thus achieving a consistent prediction in the smooth region. In addition, the DBF can distinguish the boundary by enlarging the distance between the features on different sides of the edge, thus preserving the boundary information well. Experimental results on two widely used datasets, the ISPRS 2-D semantic labeling Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets, demonstrate that our proposed DBFNet can achieve a highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Luffy03/DBFNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, deep learning based multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) image fusion methods have been proposed, which extracted features automatically and hierarchically by a series of non-linear transformations to model the complicated imaging discrepancy. But they always pay more attention to the extraction and compensation of spatial details and use the mean squared error or mean absolute error as a loss function, regardless of the preservation of spectral information contained in multispectral images. For the sake of the improvements in both spatial and spectral resolution, this paper presents a novel fusion model that takes the spectral preservation into consideration, and learns the spectral cues from the process of generating a spectrally refined multispectral image, which is constrained by a spectral loss between the generated image and the reference image. Then these spectral cues are used to modulate the PAN features to obtain final fusion result. Experimental results on reduced-resolution and full-resolution datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain a better fusion result in terms of visual inspection and evaluation indices when compared with current state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-precision road detection from very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has broad application value. However, the most advanced deep learning based methods often fail to identify roads when there is a distribution discrepancy between the training samples and test samples, due to their limited generalization ability. In this paper, to address this problem, an open-source data-driven domain-specific representation (OSM-DOER) framework is proposed for cross-domain road detection. On the one hand, as the spatial structure information of the source and target domains is similar, but the texture information is different, the domain-specific representation (DOER) framework is proposed, which not only aligns the distributions of the spatial structure information, but also learns the domain-specific texture information. Furthermore, in order to enhance the representation of the target domain data distribution, open-source and freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) road centerline data are utilized to generate target domain samples, which are then used in the network training as the supervised information for the target domain. Finally, to verify the superiority of the proposed OSM-DOER framework, we conducted extensive experiments with the public SpaceNet and DeepGlobe road datasets, and large-scale road datasets from Birmingham in the UK and Shanghai in China. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed OSM-DOER framework shows obvious advantages over the mainstream road detection methods, and the use of OSM road centerline data has great potential for the road detection task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning algorithms have obtained great success in semantic segmentation of very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. Nevertheless, training these models generally requires a large amount of accurate pixel-wise annotations, which is very laborious and time-consuming to collect. To reduce the annotation burden, this paper proposes a consistency-regularized region-growing network (CRGNet) to achieve semantic segmentation of VHR remote sensing images with point-level annotations. The key idea of CRGNet is to iteratively select unlabeled pixels with high confidence to expand the annotated area from the original sparse points. However, since there may exist some errors and noises in the expanded annotations, directly learning from them may mislead the training of the network. To this end, we further propose the consistency regularization strategy, where a base classifier and an expanded classifier are employed. Specifically, the base classifier is supervised by the original sparse annotations, while the expanded classifier aims to learn from the expanded annotations generated by the base classifier with the region-growing mechanism. The consistency regularization is thereby achieved by minimizing the discrepancy between the predictions from both the base and the expanded classifiers. We find such a simple regularization strategy is yet very useful to control the quality of the region-growing mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CRGNet significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes and pre-trained models are available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/CRGNet). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-class object detection in remote sensing images plays an important role in many applications but remains a challenging task because of scale imbalance and arbitrary orientations of the objects with extreme aspect ratios. In this paper, the Asymmetric Feature Pyramid Network (AFPN), Dynamic Feature Alignment (DFA) module, and Area-IoU regression loss are proposed on the basis of a one-stage cascaded detection method for the detection of multi-class objects with arbitrary orientations in remote sensing images. The designed asymmetric convolutional block is embedded into the AFPN for handling objects with extreme aspect ratios and improving the space representation with ignorable increases in calculation. The DFA module is proposed to dynamically align mismatched features, which are caused by the deviation between predefined anchors and arbitrarily oriented predicted boxes. The refined Area-IoU regression loss, which reconciles two new regression loss functions, the area-guided regression loss and IoU-guided regression loss, is proposed to simultaneously solve the scale imbalance problem and angle sensitivity problem. Experiments on three publicly available datasets, DOTA, HRSC2016, and ICDAR2015, show the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A source sequence is to be guessed with some fidelity based on a rate-limited description of an observed sequence with which it is correlated. The tension between the description rate and the exponential growth rate of the power mean of the required number of guesses is quantified. This can be viewed as the guessing version of the classical indirect-rate-distortion problem of Dobrushin-Tsybakov’62 and Witsenhausen’80. Judicious choices of the correlated sequence, the description rate, and the fidelity criterion recover a number of recent and classical results on guessing. In the context of security, the paper provides conservative estimates on a password’s remaining security after a number of bits from a correlated database have been leaked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has been proven an effective way to extract high-level features from remote sensing (RS) images automatically. Many variants of the CNN model have been proposed, including principal component analysis network (PCANet), canonical correlation analysis network (CCANet), multiple scale CCANet (MS-CCANet) and multiview CCANet (MCCANet). The PCANet is specialized for single view feature abstraction, while in many real-world practices, the RS data are frequently observed from many more views. Although CCANet, MS-CCANet and MCCANet can be applied to two or more view data, they consider only the pair-wise correlation by calculating a series of two-order covariance matrices. However, the high-order consistence, which can only be explored by collectively and simultaneously examining all views, remains undiscovered. In this paper, we propose the tensor canonical correlation analysis network (TCCANet) to tackle this problem. Particularly, TCCANet learns filter banks by simultaneously maximizing arbitrary number of views with high-order-correlation and solves the optimization problem by decomposing a covariance tensor. After the convolutional stage, we utilize binarization and block-wise histogram strategies to generate the final feature. Furthermore, we also develop a Multiple Scale version of TCCANet, i.e., MS-TCCANet, to extract enriched representation of the RS data by incorporating all previous convolutional layers. Numerical experiment results on RSSCN7 and SAT-6 datasets demonstrate the advantages of TCCANet and MS-TCCANet for RS scene recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the problem of recovering the discriminative representation of a hyperspectral remote sensing image (HRSI), which suffers from spectral variations, to boost its classification accuracy. To tackle this challenge, we propose a new method, namely local-global balanced low-rank approximation (GLB-LRA), which can increase the similarity between pixels belonging to an identical category while promoting the discriminability between pixels of different categories. Specifically, by taking advantage of the particular structural spatial information of HRSIs, we exploit the low-rankness of an HRSI robustly in both spatial and spectral domains from the perspective of local and global balance. We mathematically formulate GLB-LRA as an explicit optimization problem and propose an iterative algorithm to solve it efficiently. Experimental results over three commonly-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Images captured in hazy or foggy weather conditions, suffer from various problems, such as limited visibility, low contrast, color distortions. These images are used in many computer vision applications, such as video surveillance, transportation, remote sensing. The elimination of the haze effect from these images is essential to ensure the perfect working of these applications. The degradation of a captured image is expressed by the physical model of hazy image formation. The physical model requires the estimation of transmission to restore a haze-free image, which is one of the most important parameters of single image dehazing (SID). Due to the ill-posed nature of SID, lots of priors/assumptions have been used. However, traditional methods fail when these priors do not hold, especially for varying haze concentrations, which lead to many issues such as incomplete haze removal or over enhancement in long-range regions. In this paper, a single image dehazing method based on a superpixel and nonlinear transformation is proposed. The proposed method transforms the minimum filtering on superpixels of a hazy image into the minimum filtering on superpixels of a haze-free image using nonlinear transformation. The nonlinear transformation prevents over enhancement in the long-range regions, while the superpixels reduce the halo artifacts in the dehazed image. The experimental results on challenging real hazy images, dense-hazy images, and synthetic images have proved that a combination of nonlinear transformation and superpixels provide the strength to the proposed method. The obtained dehazed results are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively and it is found that the proposed method has tremendous performance as compared to state-of-the-art dehazing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominal grid data of geostationary remote sensing satellites are fundamental for generating the subsequent products. It can be obtained by normalized projection models, mainly based on the imaging mode. However, there are only definitions and primary descriptive equations for the normalized geostationary projection (NGP) model in the existing literature, while the corresponding imaging mode and the physical interpretation are missing, thus hindering the understanding of the produced nominal grid dataset as well as the subsequent products based on the grid. This paper first derived the imaging mode for NGP based on the limited literature. In addition, another new imaging mode was introduced and analyzed based on NGP. The corresponding projection model [nonstandard normalized geostationary projection (NNGP)] was proposed, which is entirely consistent with the situation of America’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series (GOES-R) and Chinese Fengyun-4A (FY-4A). Furthermore, this paper proposed a novel nominal projection model for frame imaging, which is consistent with the imaging mode of China’s Gaofen-4. Finally, extensive experiments were designed to comparatively analyze the three nominal grids and demonstrate a detailed difference. By providing a theoretical basis for nominal grid selection, this research is highly significant for the efficient near-real-time production and further applications of geostationary images, as well as the conversion between different datasets resulting from different nominal grid data. In addition, our models are sufficiently tested during the on-orbit running of FY-4A, the first satellite of China’s second-generation three-axis stabilized geostationary meteorological satellite series. The algorithms provide the technical support for the high-precision image navigation and registration and play a significant role in robustly producing the meteorological data with similar quality to those from GOES-R. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canopy height models (CHMs) were utilized to detect treetops and estimate individual-tree parameters. The treetop detection based on CHMs was affected by surface topography and crown characteristics. However, their effects have not been well studied. Therefore, this paper aimed at assessing the impacts of aforementioned factors to facilitate treetop identification from LiDAR-derived CHMs. To fulfill this objective, we first extended and improved the previous models for cases with various terrains. Then, a new theoretical model was developed to quantify treetop displacements for ellipsoidal tree crowns. Finally, we further analyzed the treetop displacements due to terrain slope, crown radius, crown shape, and offset distance to the slope surface. Our analysis indicates that the vertical displacement increases exponentially with terrain slope; thus, the effect of terrain slope must be considered over extremely steep areas; larger errors are observed for trees with a large crown radius; the treetop displacements are highly correlated with crown shape, the effect of topographic normalization can be neglected for conical crowns with a large crown angle, and the elliptical crown shape can reduce the treetop detection errors; and treetop displacements increases with offset distance to the slope surface in , while opposite results are observed in. In addition, the results also demonstrate that the effect of slope-distorted CHMs may be quite different for different types of tree crowns and terrains. Overall, this paper makes a significant contribution to the development of theoretical models for quantifying treetop displacements. Furthermore, our findings provide a theoretical basis and guidance for better identifying treetops from LiDAR-derived CHMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been successfully applied to SAR target detection. Different from prevalently used detection approaches with rectangle bounding box, rotatable bounding box (RBox)-based methods, such as DRBox-v1, can effectively reduce the interference of background pixels and locate the targets more finely for geospatial object detection. Although DRBox-v1 has achieved impressive detected performance, there still exist some remaining problems and room for improvement. In this paper, an improved RBox-based target detection framework is proposed to boost precision and recall rates of detection, and we refer to the method as DRBox-v2 and apply it to target detection in SAR images. The main improvements of DRBox-v2 as well as the contributions of this paper are fourfold. First, a multi-layer prior box generation strategy is designed for detecting small-scale targets. Since shallow layers lack strong sematic information, the feature pyramid network (FPN) module is applied. Second, a modified encoding scheme for RBox is proposed for more precisely estimating the position of RBox and orientation of targets. Third, a focal loss (FL) combined with hard negative mining (HNM) technique is proposed to mitigate the issue of the imbalance between positive and negative samples, which produces better results than solely employing either one. Fourth, comprehensive ablation studies are conducted to reveal the effect of each improvement on detected results. The results of the target detection on three data sets are illustrated and our method obtains 0.135, 0.081, 0.115 gains in average precision compared with three state-of-the-art methods, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the blind unmixing technique for analyzing hyperspectral images (HSIs). A joint deconvolution and blind hyperspectral unmixing (DBHU) algorithm is proposed, which is aimed at eliminating the impact of the adjacency effect (AE) on unmixing. In remote sensing imagery, the AE occurs in the presence of atmospheric scattering over a heterogeneous surface. The AE leads to blurring and additional mixing of HSIs and makes it difficult to estimate endmembers and abundances accurately. In this paper, we first model the blurred HSIs by the use of a bilinear mixing model (BMM), where a blurring kernel is used to model the mixing caused by the AE. Based on the BMM, the DBHU problem is formulated as a constrained and biconvex optimization problem. Specifically, the minimum-volume simplex (MVS) is incorporated to deal with the additional mixing caused by the AE, and 3-D total variation (TV) priors are adopted to model the spectral–spatial correlation of the data. In DBHU, the biconvex problem is efficiently solved by a nonstandard application of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, where a block coordinate descent scheme is applied by splitting the original problem into two saddle point subproblems, and then minimizing the subproblems alternately via the ADMM until convergence. The experimental results obtained with both simulated and real data confirm the viability of the proposed algorithm, and DBHU works well, even where both blurring and noise are present in the scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge of the water vapor (WV) distribution in the Earth’s atmosphere is of great importance for weather prediction. Meteorological models, in particular, the so-called limited area models, can assimilate humidity measurements, increasing the reliability of the simulated atmospheric dynamics. An important improvement can be achieved, for instance, if we are able to provide the total column with a sufficient precision and accuracy. In this paper, the novel normalized differential spectral attenuation (NDSA) approach is applied to retrieve the vertical profile of WV—and thus the total column—from measurements of differential attenuation signals at microwaves. A forward model (FM) has been used to simulate the ray-tracing of a microwave signal from a transmitter to a receiver in the atmosphere by using the 3-D atmospheric parameters as provided by a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. From the NDSA measurement, the integrated WV (IWV) content can be directly derived. A further retrieval code is able to invert the measurements of IWV along the path length, providing the vertical humidity profile, which is directly related to the total vertical column assimilated by weather prediction models. In this paper, we show that the values of the total column can be retrieved with a precision and accuracy up to about 0.6% and 2.1%, respectively, which could have a positive impact on NWP models at short time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the effect of spatial and spectral compression on the performance of statistically based retrieval. Although the quality of the information is not completely preserved during the coding process, experiments reveal that a certain amount of compression may yield a positive impact on the accuracy of retrievals. We unveil two strategies, both with interesting benefits: either to apply a very high compression, which still maintains the same retrieval performance as that obtained for uncompressed data; or to apply a moderate to high compression, which improves the performance. As a second contribution of this paper, we focus on the origins of these benefits. On the one hand, we show that a certain amount of noise is removed during the compression stage, which benefits the retrievals performance. On the other hand, we analyze the effect of compression on spectral/spatial regularization (smoothing). We quantify the amount of information shared among the spatial neighbors for the different methods and compression ratios. We also propose a simple strategy to specifically exploit spectral and spatial relations and find that, when these relations are taken into account beforehand, the benefits of compression are reduced. These experiments suggest that compression can be understood as an indirect way to regularize the data and exploit spatial neighbors information, which improves the performance of pixelwise statistics-based retrieval algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most convolutional neural network (CNN)-based cloud detection methods are built upon the supervised learning framework that requires a large number of pixel-level labels. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to manually annotate pixelwise labels for massive remote sensing images. To reduce the labeling cost, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approach to generalize the model trained on labeled images of source satellite to unlabeled images of the target satellite. To effectively address the domain shift problem on cross-satellite images, we develop a novel UDA method based on grouped features alignment (GFA) and entropy minimization (EM) to extract domain-invariant representations to improve the cloud detection accuracy of cross-satellite images. The proposed UDA method is evaluated on “Landsat- $8~\rightarrow $ ZY-3” and “GF- $1\rightarrow $ ZY-3” domain adaptation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against existing state-of-the-art UDA approaches. The code of this paper has been made available online (https://github.com/nkszjx/grouped-features-alignment). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is a hotspot and play very important role in the field of remote sensing image interpretation in recent years. With the recent development of the convolutional neural networks, a significant breakthrough has been made in the classification of remote sensing scenes. Many objects form complex and diverse scenes through spatial combination and association, which makes it difficult to classify remote sensing image scenes. The problem of insufficient differentiation of feature representations extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) still exists, which is mainly due to the characteristics of similarity for inter-class images and diversity for intra-class images. In this paper, we propose a remote sensing image scene classification method via Multi-Branch Local Attention Network (MBLANet), where Convolutional Local Attention Module (CLAM) is embedded into all down-sampling blocks and residual blocks of ResNet backbone. CLAM contains two submodules, Convolutional Channel Attention Module (CCAM) and Local Spatial Attention Module (LSAM). The two submodules are placed in parallel to obtain both channel and spatial attentions, which helps to emphasize the main target in the complex background and improve the ability of feature representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method is better than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is a hotspot and play very important role in the field of remote sensing image interpretation in recent years. With the recent development of the convolutional neural networks, a significant breakthrough has been made in the classification of remote sensing scenes. Many objects form complex and diverse scenes through spatial combination and association, which makes it difficult to classify remote sensing image scenes. The problem of insufficient differentiation of feature representations extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) still exists, which is mainly due to the characteristics of similarity for inter-class images and diversity for intra-class images. In this paper, we propose a remote sensing image scene classification method via Multi-Branch Local Attention Network (MBLANet), where Convolutional Local Attention Module (CLAM) is embedded into all down-sampling blocks and residual blocks of ResNet backbone. CLAM contains two submodules, Convolutional Channel Attention Module (CCAM) and Local Spatial Attention Module (LSAM). The two submodules are placed in parallel to obtain both channel and spatial attentions, which helps to emphasize the main target in the complex background and improve the ability of feature representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method is better than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the residual learning strategy has been integrated into the convolutional neural network (CNN) for single image super-resolution (SISR), where the CNN is trained to estimate the residual images. Recognizing that a residual image usually consists of high-frequency details and exhibits cartoon-like characteristics, in this paper, we propose a deep shearlet residual learning network (DSRLN) to estimate the residual images based on the shearlet transform. The proposed network is trained in the shearlet transform-domain which provides an optimal sparse approximation of the cartoon-like image. Specifically, to address the large statistical variation among the shearlet coefficients, a dual-path training strategy and a data weighting technique are proposed. Extensive evaluations on general natural image datasets as well as remote sensing image datasets show that the proposed DSRLN scheme achieves close results in PSNR to the state-of-the-art deep learning methods, using much less network parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of information (AoI) is gaining attention as a valuable performance metric for many IoT systems, in which a large number of devices report time-stamped updates to a central gateway. This is the case, for instance, of remote sensing, monitoring, or tracking, with broad applications in the industrial, vehicular, and environmental domain. In these settings, AoI provides insights that are complementary to those offered by throughput or latency, capturing the ability of the system to maintain an up-to-date view of the status of each transmitting device. From this standpoint, while a good understanding of the metric has been reached for point-to-point links, relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact that link layer solutions employed in IoT systems may have on AoI. In particular, no result is available for modern random access protocols, which have recently emerged as promising solutions to support massive machine-type communications. To start addressing this gap we provide in this paper the first study of the AoI of a scheme in this family, namely irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA). By means of a Markovian analysis, we track the AoI evolution at the gateway, prove that the process is ergodic, and derive a compact closed form expression for its stationary distribution. Leaning on this, we compute exact formulations for the average AoI and the age violation probability. The study reveals non-trivial design trade-offs for IRSA and highlights the key role played by the protocol operating frame size. Moreover, a comparison with the performance of a simpler slotted ALOHA strategy highlights a remarkable potential for modern random access schemes in terms of information freshness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense stereo image matching in remotely sensed images is a challenging problem, though it has been studied for more than two decades, due to occlusions, discontinuities, geometric, and radiometric distortions. A novel multiobjective fitness function-based dense stereo matching approach using genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is useful for estimating dense disparity map with an improved number of inliers for a stereo image pair, despite the constraint of finding correct disparity at depth discontinuities. In this paper, the steps of GA, such as initialization of the population, fitness function, and crossover and mutation operation, are designed and implemented to effectively deal with the problem of dense stereo image matching. To initialize the population, a Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor is computed for each pixel and multiple-size window-based matching is performed, using the similarity measures: 1) Euclidean distance and 2) spectral angle mapper. The generated disparity maps are pruned to choose a suitable subset using the designed fitness functions, considering the constraints related to stereo image pair, such as epipolar constraint, which encodes the epipolar geometry and the similarity measure that is useful to decide accuracy of the correspondences. The two objective functions are the number of inliers computed using the fundamental matrix and an energy minimization function, considering discontinuities and occlusions. The usefulness of this approach for remotely sensed stereo image pairs is demonstrated by improving the number of inliers and favorably comparing with state-of-the-art dense stereo image matching methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remotely sensed sea-surface temperature (SST) retrievals with a significant positive bias during the occurrence of upwelling phenomena along the southeastern coast of Brazil were reported in our companion paper. As a result, this paper proposes an automated bias correction algorithm to improve the MODIS long-wave multichannel SST (MCSST) retrievals during the abovementioned conditions in this region. In this paper, MODIS daytime SST data (SSTMODIS) and differences between brightness temperatures in MODIS channels 31 and 32 (BT31 − BT32) are analyzed simultaneously with hourly wind surface conditions, in situ SST at 0.3 and 10 m in depth (SSTbuoy03 and SSTbuoy10), and sensible and latent heat fluxes from the Cabo Frio buoy data (at 23° S, 42° W) during 2014. The obtained results show that some upwelling events present air temperature ($T_{\mathrm {air}}$) greater than SSTbuoy03 and low-atmospheric water vapor content. A simultaneous occurrence of these factors during upwelling conditions may lead to a warm-skin layer effect and may cause BT31 to be greater than SSTbuoy03 and BT31 − BT32 to be small (−0.18 °C ± 0.22 °C), affecting the MCSST performance. The proposed bias correction algorithm uses a least-squares curve between SSTbuoy03 and SSTMODIS retrievals when BT31 − BT32 ≤ 0.5 °C (i.e., dry atmospheric conditions). The bias correction algorithm has significantly improved the SSTMODIS bias (RMSE) from 1.43 °C to −0.2 °C (1.60 °C to 0.58 °C) when applied to 22 cloud-free pixels of MODIS during January–March of 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practical application of a new class of coprime arrays based on the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) over quadratic fields is presented in this paper. The proposed CRT arrays are constructed by ideal lattices embedded from coprime quadratic integers with $\mathbf {B}_1$ and $\mathbf {B}_2$ being their matrix representations, respectively, whereby the degrees of freedom (DOF) surges to $O(|\det {(\mathbf {B}_1\mathbf {B}_2)}|)$ with $|\det (\mathbf {B}_1)| + |\det (\mathbf {B}_2)|$ sensors. The geometrical constructions and theoretical foundations were discussed in the accompanying paper in great detail, while this paper focuses on aspects of the application of the proposed arrays in two-dimensional (2-D) remote sensing. A generalization of CRT arrays based on two or more pairwise coprime ideal lattices is proposed with closed-form expressions on sensor locations, the total number of sensors, and the achievable DOF. The issues pertaining to the coprimality of any two quadratic integers are also addressed to explore all possible ideal lattices. Exploiting the symmetry of lattices, sensor reduction methods are discussed with the coarray remaining intact for economic maximization. In order to extend conventional angle estimation techniques based on uniformly distributed arrays to the method that can exploit any coarray configurations based on lattices, this paper introduces a hexagon-to-rectangular transformation to 2-D spatial smoothing, providing the possibility of finding more compact sensor arrays. Examples are provided to verify the feasibility of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge about the placement and appearance of lane markings is a prerequisite for the creation of maps with high precision, necessary for autonomous driving, infrastructure monitoring, lanewise traffic management, and urban planning. Lane markings are one of the important components of such maps. Lane markings convey the rules of roads to drivers. While these rules are learned by humans, an autonomous driving vehicle should be taught to learn them to localize itself. Therefore, accurate and reliable lane-marking semantic segmentation in the imagery of roads and highways is needed to achieve such goals. We use airborne imagery that can capture a large area in a short period of time by introducing an aerial lane marking data set. In this paper, we propose a symmetric fully convolutional neural network enhanced by wavelet transform in order to automatically carry out lane-marking segmentation in aerial imagery. Due to a heavily unbalanced problem in terms of a number of lane-marking pixels compared with background pixels, we use a customized loss function as well as a new type of data augmentation step. We achieve a high accuracy in pixelwise localization of lane markings compared with the state-of-the-art methods without using the third-party information. In this paper, we introduce the first high-quality data set used within our experiments, which contains a broad range of situations and classes of lane markings representative of today’s transportation systems. This data set will be publicly available, and hence, it can be used as the benchmark data set for future algorithms within this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, the problem of unmixing large or multitemporal hyperspectral data sets has been specifically addressed in the remote sensing literature only by a few dedicated strategies. Among them, some attempts have been made within a distributed estimation framework, in particular, relying on the alternating direction method of multipliers. In this paper, we propose to study the interest of a partially asynchronous distributed unmixing procedure based on a recently proposed asynchronous algorithm. Under standard assumptions, the proposed algorithm inherits its convergence properties from recent contributions in nonconvex optimization, while allowing the problem of interest to be efficiently addressed. Comparisons with a distributed synchronous counterpart of the proposed unmixing procedure allow its interest to be assessed on synthetic and real data. Besides, thanks to its genericity and flexibility, the procedure investigated in this paper can be implemented to address various matrix factorization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attainable performance of various Doppler sublook or subband cross correlation techniques for vessel detection in synthetic aperture radar images. Research from the past two decades claims that these techniques were capable of improving the detection of small ships in challenging maritime environments. Despite many published experimental examples, a thorough analytical investigation corroborating this claim is noticeably absent. This paper is based on a rigorous theoretical analysis founded on the statistical properties of a textured sea surface model in thermal noise with simultaneous consideration of a constant false alarm rate. Emphasis has been placed on the correct accounting for detrimental physical effects caused by the Doppler spectrum being split into nonoverlapping parts, which have not been sufficiently considered in the literature to date. The theoretical results are confirmed via simulations and are substantiated with real RADARSAT-2 data. The analysis in this paper has neither found theoretical nor empirical evidence that sublook correlation techniques outperform the classical detector based on the image magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underground hydrocarbon reservoir rocks comprise numerous multiscale irregular pores that significantly affect the mechanical and fluid transport properties of the rock. It is considerably challenging for in situ geological monitoring and laboratory tests to accurately characterize the changes in the interior structure and the corresponding mechanical properties of the rock mass during dynamic excavation processes. The 3-D numerical reconstruction models that are based on the statistical information extracted from X-ray computed tomography (XCT) images provide a feasible method to obtain and characterize the interior pore structures and their effects on the physical responses of reservoir rocks. However, obtaining sufficient high-resolution 2-D XCT images is economically expensive by the traditional fan beam CT scan system. Reconstructing 3-D porous structures by computational methods using statistical information extracted from XCT images usually has low efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel method to numerically reconstruct natural sandstone rock using a small number of 2-D XCT images. The Bayesian information criterion was used to determine the minimum number of 2-D XCT images required to ensure the expected reconstruction accuracy. A multithread parallel reconstruction scheme was employed to improve the efficiency. The accuracy of the proposed method was verified by comparing the statistical correlation functions, geometrical and topological characteristics, and mechanical properties of pore structures between the reconstructed model and a sandstone prototype. This paper provides a method to achieve fast, economic, and accurate 3-D reconstruction of porous rock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to solving a full-wave inverse scattering problem (ISP), which is aimed at retrieving permittivities of dielectric scatterers from the knowledge of measured scattering data. ISPs are highly nonlinear due to multiple scattering, and iterative algorithms with regularizations are often used to solve such problems. However, they are associated with heavy computational cost, and consequently, they are often time-consuming. This paper proposes the convolutional neural network (CNN) technique to solve full-wave ISPs. We introduce and compare three training schemes based on U-Net CNN, including direct inversion, backpropagation, and dominant current schemes (DCS). Several representative tests are carried out, including both synthetic and experimental data, to evaluate the performances of the proposed methods. It is demonstrated that the proposed DCS outperforms the other two schemes in terms of accuracy and is able to solve typical ISPs quickly within 1 s. The proposed deep-learning inversion scheme is promising in providing quantitative images in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a wireless sensor network system (WSNS) for effective, reliable, and efficient monitoring of landslides. The system incorporates a network of wireless inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor devices for collecting movement data, a local base station for data gathering, a capture server for data processing and storage, and a warning system. The major contributions of this paper are: 1) two approaches for defining movement thresholds; 2) landslide classification concept based on IMU sensor data patterns and magnitudes; and 3) a conceptual framework for building an intelligent and reliable wireless monitoring and warning system. The IMU sensor data collected by three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope were utilized to define the movement thresholds and classify landslides based on specially designed laboratory experiments. The performances of the IMU sensors and the base station for data collection and communication were tested through a rock-fall experiment conducted in the field conditions. The WSN-IMU system is capable of monitoring all types of slope movements independent of the triggering factors. The unique ability of the WSN-IMU system to determine landslide types allows designers and authorized personnel to predict subsequent movement pattern and duration so as to implement appropriate risk management and control measures to alleviate the socioeconomic losses. This paper outcome serves as the foundation for future studies and technological advancements that will facilitate landslide stabilization or mitigation actions as well as to predict the intensity of damages associated with those landslides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ozone mapping and profiler suite (OMPS) is carried onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite that was launched on October 28, 2011. The OMPS mission objectives concern atmospheric ozone concentrations and their variations in the earth atmosphere. A successful thorough on-orbit sensor calibration enabled current validated operational sensor data record (SDR) stage, providing quality sensor data that meet the requirements and users’ expectations. The calibration coefficients derived from this paper have been successfully used in a life-cycle SDR reprocessing to improve sensor data quality. In this paper, we present our qualitative analyses and the results of OMPS nadir mapper SDR on-orbit calibration, and address current SDR data quality in relation to instrument detector performance, stray light correction, and wavelength registration. Our OMPS SDR calibration experience sets a reference for the successor instruments for accurate long-term monitoring of ozone total column concentrations. [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]

Snow albedo plays an important role in the global climate system. There are notable missing data and error uncertainties in the current remote sensing snow albedo products that are attributed to the limits of remote-sensing technology. Due to the uncertainties of meteorological factors and the differences in various forward model simulation methods, snow albedo forward simulations also have considerable uncertainties. This paper suggests a long-time-series reconstruction of snow albedo utilizing a forward radiation-transferring model and a remote-sensing retrieval model together with multisource remotely sensed data and meteorological data. The key to this paper is to estimate snow information for areas lacking data utilizing a forward model for snow albedo with clear physical mechanisms. The estimated snow information can be used as reliable data for snow albedo reconstructions. The results indicate that the long time series of snow albedo data obtained by coupling the snow albedo retrieval model and forward simulation model is highly accurate. The mean absolute error, root mean square error, Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R), and Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient of the observed and reconstructed snow albedos are 0.11, 0.14, 0.79, and 0.69, respectively. The reconstructed snow albedo data are underestimated by only 11% relative to the in situ snow surface albedo measurements. In the alpine mountain regions, the proposed method has a simulation accuracy that is 6% greater than that of the MOD10A1 SAD. This paper provides an effective reconstruction solution that improves the accuracy of estimations of snow albedo and fills gaps in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel approach to automatically detect and count cars in different aerial images, which can be satellite or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. Variations in satellite and/or UAV data make it particularly challenging to have a robust method that works properly on a variety of images. A solution based on the bag-of-words (BoW) model is explored in this paper due to its invariance characteristic and highly stable performance in object/scene categorization. Different from categorization tasks, vehicle detection needs to localize the positions of cars in images. To make BoW suitable for this purpose, we extensively improve the methodology in three aspects, namely, by introducing a recently proposed feature representation, i.e., the local steering kernel descriptor, adding spatial structure constraints, and developing an orientation aware scanning mechanism to produce detection with “one-window-one-car” results. Experiments are conducted on various aerial images with large variations, which consist of data from two public databases, e.g., the Overhead Imagery Research Data Set and Vehicle Detection in Aerial Imagery, as well as other satellite and UAV images. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Compared with existing techniques, the proposed method is applicable to a wider range of aerial images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A generalized continuous wave synthetic aperture radar (GCW-SAR) concept is proposed in this paper. By using full-duplex radio frontend and continuous wave signaling, the GCW-SAR system can overcome a number of limitations inherent within the existing SAR systems and achieve high-resolution and wide-swath remote sensing with low-power signal transmission. Unlike the conventional pulsed SAR and the frequency-modulated continuous-wave SAR, the GCW-SAR reconstructs a radar image by directly correlating the received 1-D raw data after self-interference cancellation with predetermined location-dependent reference signals. A fast imaging algorithm, called the piecewise constant Doppler (PCD) algorithm, is also proposed, which produces the radar image recursively in the azimuth direction without any intermediate step, such as range compression and migration compensation, as required by conventional algorithms. By removing the stop-and-go assumption or slow-time sampling in azimuth, the PCD algorithm not only achieves better imaging quality but also allows for more flexible waveform and system designs. Analyses and simulations show that the GCW-SAR tolerates significant self-interference and works well with a large selection of various system parameters. The work presented in this paper establishes a solid theoretical foundation for next-generation imaging radars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new joint spectral–spatial subpixel mapping model is proposed for hyperspectral remotely sensed imagery. Conventional approaches generally use an intermediate step based on the derivation of fractional abundance maps obtained after a spectral unmixing process, and thus the rich spectral information contained in the original hyperspectral data set may not be utilized fully. In this paper, a concept of subpixel abundance map, which calculates the abundance fraction of each subpixel to belong to a given class, was introduced. This allows us to directly connect the original (coarser) hyperspectral image with the final subpixel result. Furthermore, the proposed approach incorporates the spectral information contained in the original hyperspectral imagery and the concept of spatial dependence to generate a final subpixel mapping result. The proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated using both synthetic and real hyperspectral images, and the obtained results demonstrate that the method achieves better results when compared to other seven subpixel mapping methods. The numerical comparisons are based on different indexes such as the overall accuracy and the CPU time. Moreover, the obtained results are statistically significant at 95% confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the urgent demand for remote sensing big data analysis, large-scale remote sensing image retrieval (LSRSIR) attracts increasing attention from researchers. Generally, LSRSIR can be divided into two categories as follows: uni-source LSRSIR (US-LSRSIR) and cross-source LSRSIR (CS-LSRSIR). More specifically, US-LSRSIR means the inquiry remote sensing image and images in the searching data set come from the same remote sensing data source, whereas CS-LSRSIR is designed to retrieve remote sensing images with a similar content to the inquiry remote sensing image that are from a different remote sensing data source. In the literature, US-LSRSIR has been widely exploited, but CS-LSRSIR is rarely discussed. In practical situations, remote sensing images from different kinds of remote sensing data sources are continually increasing, so there is a great motivation to exploit CS-LSRSIR. Therefore, this paper focuses on CS-LSRSIR. To cope with CS-LSRSIR, this paper proposes source-invariant deep hashing convolutional neural networks (SIDHCNNs), which can be optimized in an end-to-end manner using a series of well-designed optimization constraints. To quantitatively evaluate the proposed SIDHCNNs, we construct a dual-source remote sensing image data set that contains eight typical land-cover categories and 10 000 dual samples in each category. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SIDHCNNs can yield substantial improvements over several baselines involving the most recent techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The infrared atmospheric sounder interferometer (IASI) onboard the Metop-A and Metop-B satellites is an essential instrument for numerical weather prediction centers. The IASI, with its 8461 channels, enables the observation of the surface and atmospheric geophysical variables twice a day around the world. This data volume will increase in the future, stressing the need for practical and efficient dimension reduction techniques for storage and transmission but also for inversion or assimilation. In a previous paper by Aires et al., a new dimension reduction method, the so-called bottleneck channel (BC), has been introduced. BCs are a good compromise between compression and channel selection techniques. In this paper, we introduce several new technical configurations of the BC approach, comparing their advantages/drawbacks. Comparisons are also made with two classical methodologies widely used in the satellite community: principal component analysis (PCA) compression and entropy reduction channel selection. Beyond the compression ability, the methodologies are tested on the temperature, water vapor, and ozone retrieval application using IASI measurements. Two approaches have been tested. First, theoretical retrieval improvement has been measured when using the various data reduction techniques. The BC achieves good theoretical improvements, comparable to noise-adjusted PCA (NAPCA), for the retrieval of the temperature, water vapor, and ozone. Second, a neural network inversion scheme is tested on real IASI observations using the several data reduction techniques. It is shown that BCs provide similar or better results than the other methods. The BCs present compression, denoising, and information content results comparable to the NAPCA, while preserving the physical meaning (i.e., actual channel brightness temperatures) of a channel selection approach. This has numerous advantages for inversion and assimilation: the mixing problem, contamination effects, minor constituents representation, or radiative transfer speed, and each of these will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, monitoring of metal-cased oil wells using the ultrawideband (UWB) radar is proposed. The inspection includes the detection and imaging of perforations and corroded areas in a metal pipe. Detection of small anomalies/ perforations on the surface of a narrow metal pipe is very challenging. Here, we present a method for imaging such small anomalies based on the extra time delay of the reflected pulse due to the effect of perforation in the radar near field. In this paper, the necessary concepts for the use of UWB radar specified for this application are developed and proved based on different measurement and simulation scenarios. We have experimentally demonstrated the effect of the perforations’ size on the time delay of reflected pulses. The distance between the perforation and the radar, for the near-field phenomenon, is critical for an effective detection and imaging. Therefore, we also studied the optimal distance between the radar and the perforation. Perforations with a size range of 1–3 cm are considered for the experiments and simulations. The experiments are done both in air and diesel. Synthetic aperture radar processing is used to reconstruct the images of the perforations and corroded area. Measurement and simulation results demonstrate the potential of UWB radar systems for oil well monitoring applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salt marsh vegetation extent and zonation are often controlled by bottom up factors determined in part by the frequency and duration of tidal inundation. Tidal inundation during remote-sensing mapping of salt marsh resources can alter the resulting image classification. The degree of this impact on mapping with very high resolution (VHR) imagery has yet to be determined. This paper utilizes topobathymetric light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data and bathtub models of a tidal stage at 5 cm intervals from mean low water (MLW) to mean high water (MHW) and determines the impact of tidal variation in salt marsh mapping within Jamaica Bay, NY, USA. Tidal inundation models were compared with the Worldview-2 and Quickbird-2 imageries acquired at a range of tidal stages. The modeled inundation of normalized difference vegetation index and smooth cordgrass (S. alterniflora) maps was compared from MLW to MHW. This paper finds that at 0.6 m above MLW, only 3.5% of S. alterniflora is inundated. This paper demonstrates a modeling approach integrating VHR satellite remote-sensing data and topobathymetric LiDAR data to address tidal variation in salt marsh mapping. The incremental modeling of the tidal stage is important for understanding areas most at risk from sea level rise and informs management decisions in accordance with this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel method based on deformable dictionary learning for detecting the regions of change between multitemporal image pairs. We build on our previous work, which constructed a pair of dictionaries. The main shortcoming of this method was its dependence on a large amount of training data. In practice, there is often a shortage of ground-truthed training images, which limits the expression capability of the resulting dictionaries. This paper overcomes this challenge by incorporating the concept of deformation, wherein each atom of a dictionary is no longer a simple image patch, but instead is a flexible image deformation function. This enables the creation of more expressive dictionaries, capable of generalizing to a far greater variety of image patterns, while using a far smaller amount of ground-truthed images for supervised dictionary training. Deformation similarity is employed for patch matching to find the best set of atoms in the difference image (DI) dictionary for reconstructing image patches for a new input DI. Each such atom can be deformed to achieve a better match, thus extending generality while reducing the number of atoms needed in the dictionary. Multiple deformed atoms are weighted and combined to best reconstruct the input DI patch. Then, the same set of deformations and weights is projected to the corresponding atoms in the CD dictionary to obtain the output change-detection map. Experiments in six realistic synthetic aperture radar data sets demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with five other state-of-the-art methods from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification is an important technique for remote sensing data interpretation. In order to enhance the performance of a supervised classifier and ensure the lowest possible cost of the training samples used in the process, active learning (AL) can be used to optimize the training sample set. At the same time, integrating spatial information can help to enhance the separability between similar classes, which can in turn reduce the need for training samples in AL. To effectively integrate spatial information into the AL framework, this paper proposes a new active relearning (ARL) model for remote sensing image classification. In particular, our model is used to relearn the spatial features on the classification map, which contributes significantly to enhancing the performance of the classifier. We integrate the relearning model into the AL framework, with the aim to accelerate the convergence of AL and further reduce the labeling cost. Under the newly developed ARL framework, we propose two spatial–spectral uncertainty criteria to optimize the procedure for selecting new training samples. Furthermore, an adaptive multiwindow ARL model is also introduced in this paper. Our experiments with two hyperspectral images and two very high resolution images indicate that the ARL model exhibits faster convergence speed with fewer samples than traditional AL methods. Our results also suggest that the proposed spatial–spectral uncertainty criteria and the multiwindow version can further improve the performance when implementing ARL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been previously demonstrated that it is possible to perform remote vibrometry using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in conjunction with the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFrFT). Specifically, the DFrFT estimates the chirp parameters (related to the instantaneous acceleration of a vibrating object) of a slow-time signal associated with the SAR image. However, ground clutter surrounding a vibrating object introduces uncertainties in the estimate of the chirp parameter retrieved via the DFrFT method. To overcome this shortcoming, various techniques based on subspace decomposition of the SAR slow-time signal have been developed. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of these techniques is limited to values of signal-to-clutter ratio ≥5 dB. In this paper, a new vibrometry technique based on displaced-phase-center antenna (DPCA) SAR is proposed. The main characteristic of a DPCA-SAR is that the clutter signal can be canceled, ideally, while retaining information on the instantaneous position and velocity of a target. In this paper, a novel method based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is introduced for performing vibrometry using the slow-time signal of a DPCA-SAR. The DPCA-SAR signal model for a vibrating target, the mathematical characterization of the EKF technique, and vibration estimation results for various types of vibration dynamics are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, multifeature learning in collaborative representation classification (CRC) for hyperspectral images has generated promising performance. In this paper, two novel multifeature learning algorithms that update dictionary directly and indirectly are proposed. In order to offer the complementarity of multifeature, four different types of features—global feature (i.e., Gabor feature), local feature (i.e., local binary pattern), shape feature (i.e., extended multiattribute profiles), and spectral feature—are adopted in this paper. Under the hypothesis that most of the features should share the same coding pattern in CRC, this paper proposes to learn proper dictionaries for each feature until obtaining stable codes in a linear classifier. Furthermore, to avoid the explicit mapping of infinite-dimensional dictionaries in a nonlinear kernelized classifier, an indirect approach to construct the transformation matrix from original dictionaries to learn new dictionaries is developed. Three real hyperspectral images acquired from different sensors are adopted for performance evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can provide superior performance compared with those of the state-of-the-art classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on open forests and woodlands within the Injune Landscape Collaborative Project research area in central southeast Queensland, Australia, and using dual-pol (HH and HV) ALOS PALSAR repeat-pass InSAR data (temporal baseline of 92 days), this paper explores the detection of forest disturbance from the spaceborne repeat-pass InSAR correlation magnitude by developing a simple and efficient forest disturbance detection approach. In particular, a generic physical InSAR scattering model is derived by accounting for the forest disturbance information as well as the normal temporal decorrelation effects that are later compensated for using the modified Random Volume over Ground model. Based on the generic model, a quantitative indicator of forest disturbance is retrieved, namely, disturbance index that varies from 0 (no disturbance) to 1 (complete deforestation). This index is compared with that identified using a time series of Landsat sensor data over a selective logging area and has a relative root mean square error of 13% at a spatial resolution of 0.8 ha. This paper highlights the use of the co-pol InSAR correlation magnitude for forest disturbance detection, which serves as a complimentary application to using the cross-pol counterpart for forest height inversion in a companion work. Given the global availability of this type of data (e.g., Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s ALOS-1/2 and NASA-ISRO’s NISAR), the method is anticipated to contribute to the range of tools being developed for large-scale forest disturbance assessment and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface roughness is a land-surface parameter that is widely used in terrain analysis. Some typical roughness details, which have important effects on surface analysis, fail to be characterized on previous roughness maps. The objective of this paper is to provide a more accurate small-to-large scale roughness overview. The new roughness method is designed based on a complete orthogonal system called the V-system. The V-system roughness utilizes the special functions to detect and extract the roughness characteristics from high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). In this paper, Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeterderived DEMs are used as the source data for the roughness calculation. Compared with the global root-mean-square slope and Fourier-based roughness maps, the V-system roughness maps show that more typical roughness details have been added to clearly indicate the small roughness variations on the large map. Furthermore, the reliability and practicability of V-system roughness are demonstrated based on the multiresolution DEMs. As an example, the statistical parameters of the roughness characteristics in the lunar Maria and highlands identify the fact that the highlands are rougher at all scales than the Maria. And this difference corresponds to the basic roughness property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated the sensitivity of passive microwave L-band soil moisture (SM) retrieval from multiangle airborne brightness temperature data obtained under morning and afternoon conditions from the National Airborne Field Experiment conducted in southeast Australia in 2006. Ground measurements at a dryland focus farm including soil texture, soil temperature, and vegetation water content were used as ancillary data to drive the retrieval model. The derived SM was then in turn evaluated with the ground-measured near-surface SM patterns. The results of this paper show that the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity target accuracy of 0.04 m3·m-3 for single-SM retrievals is achievable irrespective of the 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. overpass acquisition times for moisture conditions≥0.15 m3·m-3. Additional tests on the use of the air temperature as proxy for the vegetation temperature also showed no preference for the acquisition time. The performance of multiparameter retrievals of SM and an additional parameter proved to be satisfactory for SM modeling--independent of the acquisition time--with root-mean-square errors less than 0.06 m3·m-3 for the focus farm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]