Hybrid Adaptive Prediction Mechanisms with Multilayer Propagation Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Compression

Hyperspectral image compression has become increasingly important in data exploitation because of enormous data volumes and high redundancy provided by hundreds of contiguous spectral channels. Since a hyperspectral image can be viewed as a 3-dimensional (3D) image cube, many efforts have been devoted to extending 2D image compression techniques to perform 3D image compression on hyperspectral image cubes. Unfortunately, some major issues generally encountered in hyperspectral data exploitation at low or very low-bit rate compression, for example, subpixels and mixed pixels which do not occur in traditional pure pixel-based image compression are often overlooked in such a 2D-to-3D compression. Accordingly, a direct application of 2D-to-3D compression techniques to hyperspectral image cubes without taking precaution may result in significant loss of crucial spectral information provided by subtle substances such as small objects, anomalies during low bit-rate lossy compression. This paper takes a rather different view by investigating lossy hyperspectral compression from a perspective of exploring spectral information, referred to as exploitation-based lossy compression and further develops spectral/spatial hyperspectral image compression to effectively preserve crucial and vital spectral information of objects which are generally missed by commonly used mean-squared error (MSE) or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-based compression techniques when lossy compression is performed at low bit rates. In order to demonstrate advantages of the proposed spectral/spatial compression approach applications of subpixel target detection and mixed pixel analysis are used for experiments for performance evaluation.

Hyperspectral imaging is concerned with the measurement, analysis, and interpretation of spectra acquired from a given scene (or specific object) at a short, medium or long distance by an airbone or satellite sensor. Over the last few years, hyperspectral image data sets have been collected for a great amount of locations over the world, using a variety of instruments for Earth observation. Despite the increasing importance of hyperspectral images in remote sensing applications, there is no common repository of hyperspectral data intended to distribute and share hyperspectral data sets in the community. Quite opposite, the hyperspectral data sets which are available for public use are spread among different storage locations and present significant heterogeneity regarding the storage format, associated meta-data (if any), or ground-truth availability. As a result, the development of a standardized hyperspectral data repository is a highly desired goal in the remote sensing community. In this paper, we take a necessary first step towards the development of a digital repository for remotely sensed hyperspectral data. The proposed system allows uploading new hyperspectral data sets along with meta-data, ground-truth and analysis results, with the ultimate goal of sharing publicly available hyperspectral images within the remote sensing community. The database has been designed in order to allow storing relevant information for the hyperspectral data available through the system, including basic image characteristics (width, height, number of bands, format) and more advanced meta-data (ground-truth information, publications in which the data has been used). The current implementation consists of a front-end to ease the management of images through a web interface, thus containing both synthetic and real hyperspectral images from two highly representative instruments, such as NASAs Airborne Visible Infra-Red Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) over the Cuprite Mining District in Nevada. Most importantly, the developed system includes a spectral unmixing-based content based image retrieval (CBIR) functionality which allows searching for images on the spectral unmixing information (spectrally pure components or endmembers and their associated abundances in the scene). This information is stored as meta-data associated to each hyperspectral image instance, and then used to search and retrieve images based on information content. This paper presents the design of the system and a preliminary validation of the unmixing-based retrieval functionality using both synthetic and real hyperspectral images stored in the database.

Nonnegative tensor Tucker decomposition (NTD) in a transform domain (e.g., 2D-DWT, etc) has been used in the compression of hyper-spectral images because it can remove redundancies between spectrum bands and also exploit spatial correlations of each band. However, the use of a NTD has a very high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a low complexity NTD-based compression method of hyper-spectral images. This method is based on a pair-wise multilevel grouping approach for the NTD to overcome its high computational cost. The proposed method has a low complexity under a slight decrease of the coding performance compared to conventional NTD. We experimentally confirm this method, which indicates that this method has the less processing time and keeps a better coding performance than the case that the NTD is not used. The proposed approach has a potential application in the loss compression of hyper-spectral or multi-spectral images

In recent studies, superpixel segmentation has been integrated into hyperspectral (HS) image classification methods. However, the existing superpixel-based classification methods usually suffer from two serious problems. First, the accuracy and efficiency of current superpixel segmentation approaches cannot meet the demands of practical applications for HS images; second, conventional superpixel-based classification methods generally consider each generated superpixel as a unit for the image classification, which may help to reduce the computing time but result in a significant decrease of the classification accuracy. To solve the problems, we propose a fast region growing based superpixel segmentation (FRGSS) algorithm and a novel texture-adaptive superpixel integration strategy (TASIS) for the HS image classification. Experimental results on real Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) HS images demonstrate that the proposed FRGSS outperforms the state-of-the-art superpixel algorithm. In addition, the superiority of the TASIS is verified compared to the pixel-wise and the conventional superpixel-based classification methods.

The data size of hyperspectral image is too large for storage and transmission, and it has become a bottleneck restricting its applications. So it is necessary to study a high efficiency compression method for hyperspectral image. Prediction encoding is easy to realize and has been studied widely in the hyperspectral image compression field. Fractal coding has the advantages of high compression ratio, resolution independence, and a fast decoding speed, but its application in the hyperspectral image compression field is not popular. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for hyperspectral image compression based on hybrid prediction and fractal. Intraband prediction is implemented to the first band and all the remaining bands are encoded by modified fractal coding algorithm. The proposed algorithm can effectively exploit the spectral correlation in hyperspectral image, since each range block is approximated by the domain block in the adjacent band, which is of the same size as the range block. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides very promising performance at low bitrate. Compared to other algorithms, the encoding complexity is lower, the decoding quality has a great enhancement, and the PSNR can be increased by about 5 dB to 10 dB.

Fusion of hyperspectral images and lidar-based dems for coastal mapping

Abstract. Over the past decade hyper spectral (HS) image analysis has turned into one of the most powerful and growing technologies in the field of remote sensing. While HS images cover large area at fine spectral resolution, their spatial resolutions are often too coarse for the use in various applications. Hence improving their resolution has a high payoff. This paper presents a novel approach for super-resolution (SR) of HS images using compressive sensing (CS). Besides ill-posedness of SR problem, the main challenge in HS super-resolution is to preserve spectral contents among all bands while increasing their spatial resolutions. In this work, we first obtain an initial estimate of the super-resolution on a reduced dimension HS data. The HS observations of different wavelengths are represented as linear combination of smaller number of basis image planes (BIPs) using principal component analysis (PCA). The novelty of our approach lies in using CS based approach to super-resolve the most informative PCA transformed image representing highest spectral variance (i.e. the first principal component). Our approach uses low and high spatial resolution dictionaries of patches generated by random sampling of raw patches of PCA transformed images that are generated using the training images having similar statistical properties. Using the sparsity constraint, low resolution test patch is represented as a sparse linear combination of relevant dictionary elements adaptively, that leads to initial estimate of super-resolved PCA image having maximum spectral variability. Since SR is an ill-posed problem, we obtain the final solution using a regularization framework considering the sparse coefficients obtained by the CS approach and the autoregressive (AR) parameters obtained from the initial estimate. The remaining PCA images are up-scaled using regularization, considering the same AR parameters which were obtained from super-resolved PCA image having maximum spectral variability. Experiments are conducted on real HS images collected by Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS). Visual inspections and quantitative comparison confirm that our method enhances spatial information without introducing significant spectral distortion.

Abstract. Hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain hundreds of spectral bands, providing high-resolution spectral information pertaining to the Earth’s surface. Additionally, abundant spatial contextual information can also be obtained simultaneously from a HSI. To characterize the properties of ground objects, classification is the most widely-used technology in the field of remote sensing, where each pixel in a HSI is assigned to a pre-defined class. Over the past decade, deep learning has attracted increasing attention in the machine-learning and computer-vision domains, due to its favourable performances for various types of tasks, and it has been successfully introduced to the remote-sensing community. Instead of utilizing the shallow features within in a given image, which is the approach that is generally adopted in other conventional classification methods, deep-learning algorithms can extract hierarchical features from raw HSI data. Within the deep-learning framework, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are able to encode sequential features, have exhibited promising capabilities and have achieved encouraging performances, especially for the natural-language processing and speech-recognition communities. As multi-temporal remote-sensing images can be readily obtained from increasing numbers of satellite and unmanned aircraft systems, and since analysis of such multi-temporal data comprises a critical issue within numerous research subfields, including land-cover and land-change analyses, and land-resource management, RNNs have been applied in recent studies in order to extract temporal sequential features from multi-temporal remote-sensing images for the purpose of image classification. Apart from using multi-temporal image datasets, RNNs can also be utilized on a single image, where the spectral feature/band of each individual pixel can be taken as a sequential feature for the input layer of RNNs. However, the application of such sequential feature extraction that relies on a single image still needs to be further investigated since applying RNNs to spectral bands will directly introduce more parameters that need to be optimized, consequently increasing the total training time.In this study, we propose a novel RNN-based HSI classification framework. In this framework, unlabelled pixels obtained from a single image are considered when constructing sequential features. Two spatial similarity measurements, referred to as pixel-matching and block-matching, respectively, are employed to extract pixels that are “similar” to the target pixel. Then, the sequential feature of the target pixel is constructed by exploiting several of the most “similar” pixels and ordering them based on their similarities to the target pixel. The aforementioned two schemes are advantageous, as unlabelled pixels within the given HSI are taken into consideration for similarity measurement and sequential feature construction for the RNN model. Moreover, the block-matching scheme also takes advantage of spatial contextual information, which has been widely utilized in spatial-spectral-based HSI classification methods. To evaluate the proposed methods, two benchmark HSIs are used, including a HSI collected over Pavia University, Italy by the airborne Reflective Optics System Imaging Spectrometer (ROSIS) sensor, and an image acquired over the Salinas Valley, California, USA via the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor. Spatio-temporally coincident ground-reference data accompanies each of these respective HSIs. In addition, the proposed methods are compared with three state-of-the-art algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), the 1-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN), and the 1-dimensional RNN (1DRNN).Experimental results indicate that our proposed methods achieve markedly better classification performance compared with the baseline algorithms on both datasets. For example, for the Pavia University image, the block-matching based RNN achieves the highest overall classification accuracy, with 94.32% accuracy, which is 9.87% higher than the next most accurate algorithm of the aforementioned three baseline methods, which in this case is the 1DCNN, with 84.45% overall accuracy. More specifically, the block-matching method performs better than the pixel-matching method in terms of both quantitative and qualitative assessments. Based on visual assessment/interpretation of the classification maps, it is apparent that “salt-and-pepper” noise is markedly alleviated; with block-matching, smoother classified images are generated compared with pixel-matching-based methods and the three baseline algorithms. Such results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing spatial contextual information in the similarity measurement.

The compression of hyperspectral images (HSIs) has recently become a very attractive issue for remote sensing applications because of their volumetric data. In this paper, an efficient method for hyperspectral image compression is presented. The proposed algorithm, based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Tucker Decomposition (DWT-TD), exploits both the spectral and the spatial information in the images. The core idea behind our proposed technique is to apply TD on the DWT coefficients of spectral bands of HSIs. We use DWT to effectively separate HSIs into different sub-images and TD to efficiently compact the energy of sub-images. We evaluate the effect of the proposed method on real HSIs and also compare the results with the well-known compression methods. The obtained results show a better performance of the proposed method. Moreover, we show the impact of compression HSIs on the supervised classification and linear unmixing.

Abstract. Hyperspectral image enhancement has been a concern for the remote sensing society for detailed end member detection. Hyperspectral remote sensor collects images in hundreds of narrow, continuous spectral channels, whereas multispectral remote sensor collects images in relatively broader wavelength bands. However, the spatial resolution of the hyperspectral sensor image is comparatively lower than that of the multispectral. As a result, spectral signatures from different end members originate within a pixel, known as mixed pixels. This paper presents an approach for obtaining an image which has the spatial resolution of the multispectral image and spectral resolution of the hyperspectral image, by fusion of hyperspectral and multispectral image. The proposed methodology also addresses the band remapping problem, which arises due to different regions of spectral coverage by multispectral and hyperspectral images. Therefore we apply algorithms to restore the spatial information of the hyperspectral image by fusing hyperspectral bands with only those bands which come under each multispectral band range. The proposed methodology is applied over Henry Island, of the Sunderban eco-geographic province. The data is collected by the Hyperion hyperspectral sensor and LISS IV multispectral sensor.

The compression of hyperspectral images becomes recently very attractive issue for remote sensing applications because of the volumetric data. In this paper, an efficient method for hyperspectral image compression is presented based on Tucker Decomposition (TD) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The core idea behind our proposed technique is to apply TD on the DWT coefficients of spectral bands of hyperspectral images. Our method not only exploits redundancies between bands but also uses spatial correlation of every image band. Simulation results applied on the real hyperspectral images show a remarkable compression ratio and quality.

This study explores the utilization of Binary Embedded Zero Tree Wavelet Algorithms (BEZW) to compress hyperspectral images. The primary goal is to enhance the representation of spectral data while minimizing storage and transmission requirements. The BEZW algorithm employs wavelet transformations to leverage both spectral and spatial redundancies found in hyperspectral data cubes. Its embedded zero tree structure ensures efficient encoding of small coefficients with minimal overhead. The study evaluates the performance of the BEZW method utilizing various hyper-spectral datasets and compression settings, comparing it to other compression techniques. The results illustrate that the BEZW algorithm offers a promising approach to hyperspectral image compression, achieving competitive compression ratios while preserving spectral accuracy. This makes it a valuable option for applications where efficient hyperspectral data storage and transmission are crucial. The research contributes to the field of hyperspectral imaging by introducing an effective compression method that enhances data accessibility, simplifying the utilization of hyperspectral data in resource-constrained environments.

A significant challenge in hyperspectral remote sensing image analysis is the presence of noise, which has a negative impact on various data analysis methods such as image classification, target detection, unmixing etc. In order to address this issue, hyperspectral image denoising is used as a preprocessing step prior to classification. This paper presents an effective, fast and reliable method for denoising hyperspectral images followed by classification based on sparse representation of hyperspectral data. The use of Legendre-Fenchel transform for denoising is an effective spatial preprocessing step to improve the classification accuracy. The main advantage of Legendre-Fenchel transform is that it removes the noise in the image while preserving the sharp edges. The sparsity based algorithm namely, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) is used for classification. The experiment is done on Indian Pines data set acquired by Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor. It is inferred that the denoising of hyperspectral images before classification improves the Overall Accuracy of classification. The effect of preprocessing using Legendre Fenchel transformation is shown by comparing the classification results with Total Variation (TV) based denoising. A statistical comparison of the accuracies obtained on standard hyperspectral data before and after denoising is also analysed to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental result analysis shows that for 10\(\%\) training set the proposed method leads to the improvement in Overall Accuracy from 83.18\(\%\) to 91.06\(\%\), Average Accuracy from 86.17\(\%\) to 92.78\(\%\) and Kappa coefficient from 0.8079 to 0.8981.

Data acquired with Advanced Land Imager (ALI), Hyperspectral Imager (Hyperion) and Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS), were used to estimate and map forest LAI. Analysis methods include 1) simulating the total at-sensor radiances using MODTRAN4, 2) modifying retrieved surface reflectance with ground spectroradiometric measurements, 3) constructing 6-term LAI prediction models to predict pixel-based LAI, and 4) mapping LAI. The experimental results indicate that the retrieval of surface reflectance is the most successful with AVIRIS, followed by Hyperion and ALI. AVIRIS data can produce more reasonable LAI map than the other two sensors. The results also indicate that Hyperion data have potentially extensive application values in bio-parameter extraction at varied scales.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) based hyperspectral imager compatible with light weight UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) platforms (SPIE Proc. 7474¹, 8186B²). The FPI based hyperspectral imager was used in a UAV imaging campaign for forest and agriculture tests during the summer 2011 (SPIE Proc. 8174³). During these tests high spatial resolution Color-Infrared (CIR) images and hyperspectral images were recorded on separate flights. The spectral bands of the CIR camera were 500 - 580 nm for the green band, 580 - 700 nm for the red band and 700 - 1000 nm for the near infrared band. For the summer 2012 flight campaign a new hyperspectral imager is currently being developed. A custom made CIR camera will also be used. The system which includes both the high spatial resolution Color-Infrared camera and a light weight hyperspectral imager can provide all necessary data with just one UAV flight over the target area. The new UAV imaging system contains a 4 Megapixel CIR camera which is used for the generation of the digital surface models and CIR mosaics. The hyperspectral data can be recorded in the wavelength range 500 - 900 nm at a resolution of 10 - 30 nm at FWHM. The resolution can be selected from approximate values of 10, 15, 20 or 30 nm at FWHM.