3-D Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Supervise-Assisted Self-Supervised Deep-Learning Method for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration is a challenging research area, covering a variety of inverse problems. Previous works have shown the great success of deep learning in HSI restoration. However, facing the problem of distribution gaps between training HSIs and target HSI, those data-driven methods falter in delivering satisfactory outcomes for the target HSIs. In addition, the degradation process of HSIs is usually disturbed by noise, which is not well taken into account in existing restoration methods. The existence of noise further exacerbates the dissimilarities within the data, rendering it challenging to attain desirable results without an appropriate learning approach. To track these issues, in this article, we propose a supervise-assisted self-supervised deep-learning method to restore noisy degraded HSIs. Initially, we facilitate the restoration network to acquire a generalized prior through supervised learning from extensive training datasets. Then, the self-supervised learning stage is employed and utilizes the specific prior of the target HSI. Particularly, to restore clean HSIs during the self-supervised learning stage from noisy degraded HSIs, we introduce a noise-adaptive loss function that leverages inner statistics of noisy degraded HSIs for restoration. The proposed noise-adaptive loss consists of Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE) and total variation (TV) regularizer and fine-tunes the network with the presence of noise. We demonstrate through experiments on different HSI tasks, including denoising, compressive sensing, super-resolution, and inpainting, that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks under quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code is available at https://github.com/ying-fu/SSDL-HSI.

Hyperspectral Image Super Resolution With Real Unaligned RGB Guidance

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution has become increasingly prevalent for its capability to integrate high-frequency spatial information from the paired high-resolution (HR) RGB reference (Ref-RGB) image. However, most of the existing methods either heavily rely on the accurate alignment between low-resolution (LR) HSIs and RGB images or can only deal with simulated unaligned RGB images generated by rigid geometric transformations, which weakens their effectiveness for real scenes. In this article, we explore the fusion-based HSI super-resolution with real Ref-RGB images that have both rigid and nonrigid misalignments. To properly address the limitations of existing methods for unaligned reference images, we propose an HSI fusion network (HSIFN) with heterogeneous feature extractions, multistage feature alignments, and attentive feature fusion. Specifically, our network first transforms the input HSI and RGB images into two sets of multiscale features with an HSI encoder and an RGB encoder, respectively. The features of Ref-RGB images are then processed by a multistage alignment module to explicitly align the features of Ref-RGB with the LR HSI. Finally, the aligned features of Ref-RGB are further adjusted by an adaptive attention module to focus more on discriminative regions before sending them to the fusion decoder to generate the reconstructed HR HSI. Additionally, we collect a real-world HSI fusion dataset, consisting of paired HSI and unaligned Ref-RGB, to support the evaluation of the proposed model for real scenes. Extensive experiments are conducted on both simulated and our real-world datasets, and it shows that our method obtains a clear improvement over existing single-image and fusion-based super-resolution methods on quantitative assessment as well as visual comparison. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://zeqiang-lai.github.io/HSI-RefSR/.

Latent Diffusion Enhanced Rectangle Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

The restoration of hyperspectral image (HSI) plays a pivotal role in subsequent hyperspectral image applications. Despite the remarkable capabilities of deep learning, current HSI restoration methods face challenges in effectively exploring the spatial non-local self-similarity and spectral low-rank property inherently embedded with HSIs. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a latent diffusion enhanced rectangle Transformer for HSI restoration, tackling the non-local spatial similarity and HSI-specific latent diffusion low-rank property. In order to effectively capture non-local spatial similarity, we propose the multi-shape spatial rectangle self-attention module in both horizontal and vertical directions, enabling the model to utilize informative spatial regions for HSI restoration. Meanwhile, we propose a spectral latent diffusion enhancement module that generates the image-specific latent dictionary based on the content of HSI for low-rank vector extraction and representation. This module utilizes a diffusion model to generatively obtain representations of global low-rank vectors, thereby aligning more closely with the desired HSI. A series of comprehensive experiments were carried out on four common hyperspectral image restoration tasks, including HSI denoising, HSI super-resolution, HSI reconstruction, and HSI inpainting. The results of these experiments highlight the effectiveness of our proposed method, as demonstrated by improvements in both objective metrics and subjective visual quality.

Unsupervised Adaptation Learning for Real Multiplatform Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Real hyperspectral images (HSIs) are ineluctably contaminated by diverse types of noise, which severely limits the image usability. Recently, transfer learning has been introduced in hyperspectral denoising networks to improve model generalizability. However, the current frameworks often rely on image priors and struggle to retain the fidelity of background information. In this article, an unsupervised adaptation learning (UAL)-based hyperspectral denoising network (UALHDN) is proposed to address these issues. The core idea is first learning a general image prior for most HSIs, and then adapting it to a real HSI by learning the deep priors and maintaining background consistency, without introducing hand-crafted priors. Following this notion, a spatial-spectral residual denoiser, a global modeling discriminator, and a hyperspectral discrete representation learning scheme are introduced in the UALHDN framework, and are employed across two learning stages. First, the denoiser and the discriminator are pretrained using synthetic noisy-clean ground-based HSI pairs. Subsequently, the denoiser is further fine-tuned on the real multiplatform HSI according to a spatial-spectral consistency constraint and a background consistency loss in an unsupervised manner. A hyperspectral discrete representation learning scheme is also designed in the fine-tuning stage to extract semantic features and estimate noise-free components, exploring the deep priors specific for real HSIs. The applicability and generalizability of the proposed UALHDN framework were verified through the experiments on real HSIs from various platforms and sensors, including unmanned aerial vehicle-borne, airborne, spaceborne, and Martian datasets. The UAL denoising scheme shows a superior denoising ability when compared with the state-of-the-art hyperspectral denoisers.

Hyperspectral Image Denoising: From Model-Driven, Data-Driven, to Model-Data-Driven

Mixed noise pollution in HSI severely disturbs subsequent interpretations and applications. In this technical review, we first give the noise analysis in different noisy HSIs and conclude crucial points for programming HSI denoising algorithms. Then, a general HSI restoration model is formulated for optimization. Later, we comprehensively review existing HSI denoising methods, from model-driven strategy (nonlocal mean, total variation, sparse representation, low-rank matrix approximation, and low-rank tensor factorization), data-driven strategy [2-D convolutional neural network (CNN), 3-D CNN, hybrid, and unsupervised networks], to model-data-driven strategy. The advantages and disadvantages of each strategy for HSI denoising are summarized and contrasted. Behind this, we present an evaluation of the HSI denoising methods for various noisy HSIs in simulated and real experiments. The classification results of denoised HSIs and execution efficiency are depicted through these HSI denoising methods. Finally, prospects of future HSI denoising methods are listed in this technical review to guide the ongoing road for HSI denoising. The HSI denoising dataset could be found at https://qzhang95.github.io.

Deep Ring-Block-Wise Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Deep learning has achieved many successes in the field of the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Most of existing deep learning-based methods have no consideration of feature distribution, which may yield lowly separable and discriminative features. From the perspective of spatial geometry, one excellent feature distribution form requires to satisfy both properties, i.e., block and ring. The block means that in a feature space, the distance of intraclass samples is close and the one of interclass samples is far. The ring represents that all class samples are overall distributed in a ring topology. Accordingly, in this article, we propose a novel deep ring-block-wise network (DRN) for the HSI classification, which takes full consideration of feature distribution. To obtain the good distribution used for high classification performance, in this DRN, a ring-block perception (RBP) layer is built by integrating the self-representation and ring loss into a perception model. By such way, the exported features are imposed to follow the requirements of both block and ring, so as to be more separably and discriminatively distributed compared with traditional deep networks. Besides, we also design an optimization strategy with alternating update to obtain the solution of this RBP layer model. Extensive results on the Salinas, Pavia Centre, Indian Pines, and Houston datasets have demonstrated that the proposed DRN method achieves the better classification performance in contrast to the state-of-the-art approaches.

HPRN: Holistic Prior-Embedded Relation Network for Spectral Super-Resolution

Spectral super-resolution (SSR) refers to the hyperspectral image (HSI) recovery from an RGB counterpart. Due to the one-to-many nature of the SSR problem, a single RGB image can be reprojected to many HSIs. The key to tackle this ill-posed problem is to plug into multisource prior information such as the natural spatial context prior of RGB images, deep feature prior, or inherent statistical prior of HSIs so as to effectively alleviate the degree of ill-posedness. However, most current approaches only consider the general and limited priors in their customized convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which leads to the inability to guarantee the confidence and fidelity of reconstructed spectra. In this article, we propose a novel holistic prior-embedded relation network (HPRN) to integrate comprehensive priors to regularize and optimize the solution space of SSR. Basically, the core framework is delicately assembled by several multiresidual relation blocks (MRBs) that fully facilitate the transmission and utilization of the low-frequency content prior of RGBs. Innovatively, the semantic prior of RGB inputs is introduced to mark category attributes, and a semantic-driven spatial relation module (SSRM) is invented to perform the feature aggregation of clustered similar ranges for refining recovered characteristics. In addition, we develop a transformer-based channel relation module (TCRM), which breaks the habit of employing scalars as the descriptors of channelwise relations in the previous deep feature prior and replaces them with certain vectors to make the mapping function more robust and smoother. In order to maintain the mathematical correlation and spectral consistency between hyperspectral bands, the second-order prior constraints (SOPCs) are incorporated into the loss function to guide the HSI reconstruction. Finally, extensive experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate that our HPRN can reach the state-of-the-art performance for SSR quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, the effectiveness and usefulness of the reconstructed spectra are verified by the classification results on the remote sensing dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/Deep-imagelab/HPRN.

Contrastive Unfolding Deraining Network

Due to the fact that the degradation of image quality caused by rain usually affects outdoor vision tasks, image deraining becomes more and more important. Focusing on the single image deraining (SID) task, in this article, we propose a novel Contrastive Unfolding DEraining Network (CUDEN), which combines the traditional iterative algorithm and deep network, exhibiting excellent performance and nice interpretability. CUDEN transforms the challenge of locating rain streaks into discovering rain features and defines the relationship between the image and feature domains in terms of mapping pairs. To obtain the mapping pairs efficiently, we propose a dynamic multidomain translation (DMT) module for decomposing the original mapping into sub-mappings. To enhance the feature extraction capability of networks, we also propose a new serial multireceptive field fusion (SMF) block, which extracts complex and variable rain features with convolution kernels of different receptive fields. Moreover, we are the first to introduce contrastive learning to the SID task and combine it with perceptual loss to propose a new contrastive perceptual loss (CPL), which is quite generalized and greatly helpful in identifying the appropriate gradient descent direction during training. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed CUDEN outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) deraining networks.

Graph Information Aggregation Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Most domain adaptation (DA) methods in cross-scene hyperspectral image classification focus on cases where source data (SD) and target data (TD) with the same classes are obtained by the same sensor. However, the classification performance is significantly reduced when there are new classes in TD. In addition, domain alignment, as one of the main approaches in DA, is carried out based on local spatial information, rarely taking into account nonlocal spatial information (nonlocal relationships) with strong correspondence. A graph information aggregation cross-domain few-shot learning (Gia-CFSL) framework is proposed, intending to make up for the above-mentioned shortcomings by combining FSL with domain alignment based on graph information aggregation. SD with all label samples and TD with a few label samples are implemented for FSL episodic training. Meanwhile, intradomain distribution extraction block (IDE-block) and cross-domain similarity aware block (CSA-block) are designed. The IDE-block is used to characterize and aggregate the intradomain nonlocal relationships and the interdomain feature and distribution similarities are captured in the CSA-block. Furthermore, feature-level and distribution-level cross-domain graph alignments are used to mitigate the impact of domain shift on FSL. Experimental results on three public HSI datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The codes will be available from the website: https://github.com/YuxiangZhang-BIT/IEEE_TNNLS_Gia-CFSL.

Flexible and accurate total variation and cascaded denoisers-based image reconstruction algorithm for hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography

Hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography (HCUP) based on compressed sensing and time- and spectrum-to-space mappings can simultaneously realize the temporal and spectral imaging of non-repeatable or difficult-to-repeat transient events with a passive manner in single exposure. HCUP possesses an incredibly high frame rate of tens of trillions of frames per second and a sequence depth of several hundred, and therefore plays a revolutionary role in single-shot ultrafast optical imaging. However, due to ultra-high data compression ratios induced by the extremely large sequence depth, as well as limited fidelities of traditional algorithms over the image reconstruction process, HCUP suffers from a poor image reconstruction quality and fails to capture fine structures in complex transient scenes. To overcome these restrictions, we report a flexible image reconstruction algorithm based on a total variation (TV) and cascaded denoisers (CD) for HCUP, named the TV-CD algorithm. The TV-CD algorithm applies the TV denoising model cascaded with several advanced deep learning-based denoising models in the iterative plug-and-play alternating direction method of multipliers framework, which not only preserves the image smoothness with TV, but also obtains more priori with CD. Therefore, it solves the common sparsity representation problem in local similarity and motion compensation. Both the simulation and experimental results show that the proposed TV-CD algorithm can effectively improve the image reconstruction accuracy and quality of HCUP, and may further promote the practical applications of HCUP in capturing high-dimensional complex physical, chemical and biological ultrafast dynamic scenes.

A Survey of Deep Learning-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement

Images captured under poor lighting conditions often suffer from low brightness, low contrast, color distortion, and noise. The function of low-light image enhancement is to improve the visual effect of such images for subsequent processing. Recently, deep learning has been used more and more widely in image processing with the development of artificial intelligence technology, and we provide a comprehensive review of the field of low-light image enhancement in terms of network structure, training data, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we systematically introduce low-light image enhancement based on deep learning in four aspects. First, we introduce the related methods of low-light image enhancement based on deep learning. We then describe the low-light image quality evaluation methods, organize the low-light image dataset, and finally compare and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the related methods and give an outlook on the future development direction.

Connections Between Deep Equilibrium and Sparse Representation Models With Application to Hyperspectral Image Denoising

In this study, the problem of computing a sparse representation of multi-dimensional visual data is considered. In general, such data e.g., hyperspectral images, color images or video data consists of signals that exhibit strong local dependencies. A new computationally efficient sparse coding optimization problem is derived by employing regularization terms that are adapted to the properties of the signals of interest. Exploiting the merits of the learnable regularization techniques, a neural network is employed to act as structure prior and reveal the underlying signal dependencies. To solve the optimization problem Deep unrolling and Deep equilibrium based algorithms are developed, forming highly interpretable and concise deep-learning-based architectures, that process the input dataset in a block-by-block fashion. Extensive simulation results, in the context of hyperspectral image denoising, are provided, which demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform significantly other sparse coding approaches and exhibit superior performance against recent state-of-the-art deep-learning-based denoising models. In a wider perspective, our work provides a unique bridge between a classic approach, that is the sparse representation theory, and modern representation tools that are based on deep learning modeling.

Cooperated Spectral Low-Rankness Prior and Deep Spatial Prior for HSI Unsupervised Denoising

Model-driven methods and data-driven methods have been widely developed for hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising. However, there are pros and cons in both model-driven and data-driven methods. To address this issue, we develop a self-supervised HSI denoising method via integrating model-driven with data-driven strategy. The proposed framework simultaneously cooperates the spectral low-rankness prior and deep spatial prior (SLRP-DSP) for HSI self-supervised denoising. SLRP-DSP introduces the Tucker factorization via orthogonal basis and reduced factor, to capture the global spectral low-rankness prior in HSI. Besides, SLRP-DSP adopts a self-supervised way to learn the deep spatial prior. The proposed method doesn't need a large number of clean HSIs as the label samples. Through the self-supervised learning, SLRP-DSP can adaptively adjust the deep spatial prior from self-spatial information for reduced spatial factor denoising. An alternating iterative optimization framework is developed to exploit the internal low-rankness prior of third-order tensors and the spatial feature extraction capacity of convolutional neural network. Compared with both existing model-driven methods and data-driven methods, experimental results manifest that the proposed SLRP-DSP outperforms on mixed noise removal in different noisy HSIs.

SMDS-Net: Model Guided Spectral-Spatial Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Deep learning (DL) based hyperspectral images (HSIs) denoising approaches directly learn the nonlinear mapping between noisy and clean HSI pairs. They usually do not consider the physical characteristics of HSIs. This drawback makes the models lack interpretability that is key to understanding their denoising mechanism and limits their denoising ability. In this paper, we introduce a novel model-guided interpretable network for HSI denoising to tackle this problem. Fully considering the spatial redundancy, spectral low-rankness, and spectral-spatial correlations of HSIs, we first establish a subspace-based multidimensional sparse (SMDS) model under the umbrella of tensor notation. After that, the model is unfolded into an end-to-end network named SMDS-Net, whose fundamental modules are seamlessly connected with the denoising procedure and optimization of the SMDS model. This makes SMDS-Net convey clear physical meanings, i.e., learning the low-rankness and sparsity of HSIs. Finally, all key variables are obtained by discriminative training. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis on synthetic and real-world HSIs confirm the strong denoising ability, strong learning capability, promising generalization ability, and high interpretability of SMDS-Net against the state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods. The source code and data of this article will be made publicly available at https://github.com/bearshng/smds-net for reproducible research.

Spatial and Spectral-Channel Attention Network for Denoising on Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are frequently contaminated by different noises (Gaussian noise, stripe noise, deadline noise, impulse noise) in the acquisition process as a result of the observation environment and imaging system limitations, which makes image information lost and difficult to recover. In this paper, we adopt a 3D-based SSCA block neural network of U-Net architecture for remote sensing HSI denoising, named SSCANet (Spatial and Spectral-Channel Attention Network), which is mainly constructed by a so-called SSCA block. By fully considering the characteristics of spatial-domain and spectral-domain of remote sensing HSIs, the SSCA block consists of a spatial attention (SA) block and a spectral-channel attention (SCA) block, in which the SA block is to extract spatial information and enhance spatial representation ability, as well as the SCA block to explore the band-wise relationship within HSIs for preserving spectral information. Compared to earlier 2D convolution, 3D convolution has a powerful spectrum preservation ability, allowing for improved extraction of HSIs characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method holds better-restored results than other compared approaches, both visually and quantitatively.

Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Adversarial Learning

Due to sensor instability and atmospheric interference, hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from different kinds of noise which degrade the performance of downstream tasks. Therefore, HSI denoising has become an essential part of HSI preprocessing. Traditional methods tend to tackle one specific type of noise and remove it iteratively, resulting in drawbacks including inefficiency when dealing with mixed noise. Most recently, deep neural network-based models, especially generative adversarial networks, have demonstrated promising performance in generic image denoising. However, in contrast to generic RGB images, HSIs often possess abundant spectral information; thus, it is non-trivial to design a denoising network to effectively explore both spatial and spectral characteristics simultaneously. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end HSI denoising model via adversarial learning. More specifically, to capture the subtle noise distribution from both spatial and spectral dimensions, we designed a Residual Spatial-Spectral Module (RSSM) and embed it in an UNet-like structure as the generator to obtain clean images. To distinguish the real image from the generated one, we designed a discriminator based on the Multiscale Feature Fusion Module (MFFM) to further improve the quality of the denoising results. The generator was trained with joint loss functions, including reconstruction loss, structural loss and adversarial loss. Moreover, considering the lack of publicly available training data for the HSI denoising task, we collected an additional benchmark dataset denoted as the Shandong Feicheng Denoising (SFD) dataset. We evaluated five types of mixed noise across several datasets in comparative experiments, and comprehensive experimental results on both simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results against state-of-the-art methods. For ablation studies, we investigated the structure of the generator as well as the training process with joint losses and different amounts of training data, further validating the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Feature-Enriched Deep Convolutional Neural Network for JPEG Image Compression Artifacts Reduction and its Applications

The amount of multimedia data, such as images and videos, has been increasing rapidly with the development of various imaging devices and the Internet, bringing more stress and challenges to information storage and transmission. The redundancy in images can be reduced to decrease data size via lossy compression, such as the most widely used standard Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG). However, the decompressed images generally suffer from various artifacts (e.g., blocking, banding, ringing, and blurring) due to the loss of information, especially at high compression ratios. This article presents a feature-enriched deep convolutional neural network for compression artifacts reduction (FeCarNet, for short). Taking the dense network as the backbone, FeCarNet enriches features to gain valuable information via introducing multi-scale dilated convolutions, along with the efficient 1 ×1 convolution for lowering both parameter complexity and computation cost. Meanwhile, to make full use of different levels of features in FeCarNet, a fusion block that consists of attention-based channel recalibration and dimension reduction is developed for local and global feature fusion. Furthermore, short and long residual connections both in the feature and pixel domains are combined to build a multi-level residual structure, thereby benefiting the network training and performance. In addition, aiming at reducing computation complexity further, pixel-shuffle-based image downsampling and upsampling layers are, respectively, arranged at the head and tail of the FeCarNet, which also enlarges the receptive field of the whole network. Experimental results show the superiority of FeCarNet over state-of-the-art compression artifacts reduction approaches in terms of both restoration capacity and model complexity. The applications of FeCarNet on several computer vision tasks, including image deblurring, edge detection, image segmentation, and object detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of FeCarNet further.

3D denoised completion network for deep single-pixel reconstruction of hyperspectral images

Single-pixel imaging acquires an image by measuring its coefficients in a transform domain, thanks to a spatial light modulator. However, as measurements are sequential, only a few coefficients can be measured in the real-time applications. Therefore, single-pixel reconstruction is usually an underdetermined inverse problem that requires regularization to obtain an appropriate solution. Combined with a spectral detector, the concept of single-pixel imaging allows for hyperspectral imaging. While each channel can be reconstructed independently, we propose to exploit the spectral redundancy between channels to regularize the reconstruction problem. In particular, we introduce a denoised completion network that includes 3D convolution filters. Contrary to black-box approaches, our network combines the classical Tikhonov theory with the deep learning methodology, leading to an explainable network. Considering both simulated and experimental data, we demonstrate that the proposed approach yields hyperspectral images with higher quantitative metrics than the approaches developed for grayscale images.

LR-Net: Low-Rank Spatial-Spectral Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Due to the physical limitations of the imaging devices, hyperspectral images (HSIs) are commonly distorted by a mixture of Gaussian noise, impulse noise, stripes, and dead lines, leading to the decline in the performance of unmixing, classification, and other subsequent applications. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end low-rank spatial-spectral network (LR-Net) for the removal of the hybrid noise in HSIs. By integrating the low-rank physical property into a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the proposed LR-Net simultaneously enjoys the strong feature representation ability from DCNN and the implicit physical constraint of clean HSIs. Firstly, spatial-spectral atrous blocks (SSABs) are built to exploit spatial-spectral features of HSIs. Secondly, these spatial-spectral features are forwarded to a multi-atrous block (MAB) to aggregate the context in different receptive fields. Thirdly, the contextual features and spatial-spectral features from different levels are concatenated before being fed into a plug-and-play low-rank module (LRM) for feature reconstruction. With the help of the LRM, the workflow of low-rank matrix reconstruction can be streamlined in a differentiable manner. Finally, the low-rank features are utilized to capture the latent semantic relationships of the HSIs to recover clean HSIs. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets were conducted. The experimental results show that the LR-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art denoising methods in terms of evaluation metrics and visual assessments. Particularly, through the collaborative integration of DCNNs and the low-rank property, the LR-Net shows strong stability and capacity for generalization.

Towards On-Board Hyperspectral Satellite Image Segmentation: Understanding Robustness of Deep Learning through Simulating Acquisition Conditions

Although hyperspectral images capture very detailed information about the scanned objects, their efficient analysis, transfer, and storage are still important practical challenges due to their large volume. Classifying and segmenting such imagery are the pivotal steps in virtually all applications, hence developing new techniques for these tasks is a vital research area. Here, deep learning has established the current state of the art. However, deploying large-capacity deep models on-board an Earth observation satellite poses additional technological challenges concerned with their memory footprints, energy consumption requirements, and robustness against varying-quality image data, with the last problem being under-researched. In this paper, we tackle this issue, and propose a set of simulation scenarios that reflect a range of atmospheric conditions and noise contamination that may ultimately happen on-board an imaging satellite. We verify their impact on the generalization capabilities of spectral and spectral-spatial convolutional neural networks for hyperspectral image segmentation. Our experimental analysis, coupled with various visualizations, sheds more light on the robustness of the deep models and indicate that specific noise distributions can significantly deteriorate their performance. Additionally, we show that simulating atmospheric conditions is key to obtaining the learners that generalize well over image data acquired in different imaging settings.

Variational Low-Rank Matrix Factorization with Multi-Patch Collaborative Learning for Hyperspectral Imagery Mixed Denoising

In this study, multi-patch collaborative learning is introduced into variational low-rank matrix factorization to suppress mixed noise in hyperspectral images (HSIs). Firstly, based on the spatial consistency and nonlocal self-similarities, the HSI is partitioned into overlapping patches with a full band. The similarity metric with fusing features is exploited to select the most similar patches and construct the corresponding collaborative patches. Secondly, considering that the latent clean HSI holds the low-rank property across the spectra, whereas the noise component does not, variational low-rank matrix factorization is proposed in the Bayesian framework for each collaborative patch. Using Gaussian distribution adaptively adjusted by a gamma distribution, the noise-free data can be learned by exploring low-rank properties of collaborative patches in the spatial/spectral domain. Additionally, the Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model is utilized to approximate the statistical characteristics of mixed noises, which is constructed by exploiting the Gaussian distribution, the inverse Wishart distribution, and the Dirichlet process. Finally, variational inference is utilized to estimate all variables and solve the proposed model using closed-form equations. Widely used datasets with different settings are adopted to conduct experiments. The quantitative and qualitative results indicate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in reducing mixed noises in HSIs.