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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 January 2019) | Viewed by 77722

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Fablet Ronan

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Guest Editor

Institut Mines-Télécom, Telecom-Bretagne, UMR 6285 labSTICC, 29238 Brest, France
Interests: ocean monitoring and surveillance; satellite ocean remote sensing, data-driven approaches for inverse problems

Prof. Dr. Alexandre Baussard

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Guest Editor

Institut Charles Delaunay, Université de Technologie de Troyes, 10000 Troyes, France
Interests: electromagnetic and acoustic systems; inverse problems; machine learning; multiscale/multiresolution signal and image processing
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Remote sensing technologies have greatly widened our ability to remotely monitor the environment in a broad sense. For instance, satellite sensor technologies provide unprecedented means for space and Earth observations, whereas underwater technologies have greatly evolved to monitor marine environments. At much finer scales, we may also cite the development of wireless, wearable and/or implantable sensors, which provide new means to monitor individual behaviours and their environment. The resulting deluge of data acquired by these sensors provides a unique opportunity to develop new remote-sensing-based tools and services. Deep learning has rapidly become the state-of-the-art in machine learning with significant breakthrough on reference benchmarks in classification, forecasting, reinforcement learning, etc.

This Special Issue aims to highlight advances in the development and evaluation of deep learning models for remote sensing data. Topics include, but are not limited, to:

Deep learning architectures for remote sensing image data (e.g., spaceborne and airborne imaging sensor data, sonar imaging data, embedded cameras, etc.)
Deep learning architectures for remote sensing time series (e.g., image time series, trajectory data, etc.)
Computational models for the inversion of remote sensing data
Optimization and context-aware adaptation of remote sensing monitoring strategies
Transfer learning and multi-source data fusion, including synergy between remote sensing data, in situ data and/or numerical simulation data
Development and evaluation of new services and applications combining remote sensing data and deep learning

We encourage the authors to complement submitted manuscripts with repositories and/or containers for supplementary material, especially for a reproducible research.

Prof. Fablet Ronan
Dr. Alexandre Baussard
Guest Editors

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Keywords

Remote sensing big data
multi-source/multi-scale/multi-time synergies
new learning-based strategies for inverse problems
new learning-based services and applications

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Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

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16 pages, 1745 KiB

Open AccessArticle

CNN-Based Target Recognition and Identification for Infrared Imaging in Defense Systems

by Antoine d’Acremont, Ronan Fablet, Alexandre Baussard and Guillaume Quin

Sensors 2019, 19(9), 2040; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19092040 - 30 Apr 2019

Cited by 55 | Viewed by 9860

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have rapidly become the state-of-the-art models for image classification applications. They usually require large groundtruthed datasets for training. Here, we address object identification and recognition in the wild for infrared (IR) imaging in defense applications, where no such large-scale dataset is available. With a focus on robustness issues, especially viewpoint invariance, we introduce a compact and fully convolutional CNN architecture with global average pooling. We show that this model trained from realistic simulation datasets reaches a state-of-the-art performance compared with other CNNs with no data augmentation and fine-tuning steps. We also demonstrate a significant improvement in the robustness to viewpoint changes with respect to an operational support vector machine (SVM)-based scheme. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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14 pages, 1174 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Building Corner Detection in Aerial Images with Fully Convolutional Networks

by Weigang Song, Baojiang Zhong and Xun Sun

Sensors 2019, 19(8), 1915; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19081915 - 23 Apr 2019

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 4322

Abstract

In aerial images, corner points can be detected to describe the structural information of buildings for city modeling, geo-localization, and so on. For this specific vision task, the existing generic corner detectors perform poorly, as they are incapable of distinguishing corner points on buildings from those on other objects such as trees and shadows. Recently, fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been developed for semantic image segmentation that are able to recognize a designated kind of object through a training process with a manually labeled dataset. Motivated by this achievement, an FCN-based approach is proposed in the present work to detect building corners in aerial images. First, a DeepLab model comprised of improved FCNs and fully-connected conditional random fields (CRFs) is trained end-to-end for building region segmentation. The segmentation is then further improved by using a morphological opening operation to increase its accuracy. Corner points are finally detected on the contour curves of building regions by using a scale-space detector. Experimental results show that the proposed building corner detection approach achieves an F-measure of 0.83 in the test image set and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art corner detectors by a large margin. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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13 pages, 3388 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Flood Extent Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Data

by Asmamaw Gebrehiwot, Leila Hashemi-Beni, Gary Thompson, Parisa Kordjamshidi and Thomas E. Langan

Sensors 2019, 19(7), 1486; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19071486 - 27 Mar 2019

Cited by 159 | Viewed by 10595

Abstract

Flooding is one of the leading threats of natural disasters to human life and property, especially in densely populated urban areas. Rapid and precise extraction of the flooded areas is key to supporting emergency-response planning and providing damage assessment in both spatial and temporal measurements. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology has recently been recognized as an efficient photogrammetry data acquisition platform to quickly deliver high-resolution imagery because of its cost-effectiveness, ability to fly at lower altitudes, and ability to enter a hazardous area. Different image classification methods including SVM (Support Vector Machine) have been used for flood extent mapping. In recent years, there has been a significant improvement in remote sensing image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNNs have demonstrated excellent performance on various tasks including image classification, feature extraction, and segmentation. CNNs can learn features automatically from large datasets through the organization of multi-layers of neurons and have the ability to implement nonlinear decision functions. This study investigates the potential of CNN approaches to extract flooded areas from UAV imagery. A VGG-based fully convolutional network (FCN-16s) was used in this research. The model was fine-tuned and a k-fold cross-validation was applied to estimate the performance of the model on the new UAV imagery dataset. This approach allowed FCN-16s to be trained on the datasets that contained only one hundred training samples, and resulted in a highly accurate classification. Confusion matrix was calculated to estimate the accuracy of the proposed method. The image segmentation results obtained from FCN-16s were compared from the results obtained from FCN-8s, FCN-32s and SVMs. Experimental results showed that the FCNs could extract flooded areas precisely from UAV images compared to the traditional classifiers such as SVMs. The classification accuracy achieved by FCN-16s, FCN-8s, FCN-32s, and SVM for the water class was 97.52%, 97.8%, 94.20% and 89%, respectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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22 pages, 11171 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Improving Regional and Teleseismic Detection for Single-Trace Waveforms Using a Deep Temporal Convolutional Neural Network Trained with an Array-Beam Catalog

by Joshua Dickey, Brett Borghetti and William Junek

Sensors 2019, 19(3), 597; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19030597 - 31 Jan 2019

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4953

Abstract

The detection of seismic events at regional and teleseismic distances is critical to Nuclear Treaty Monitoring. Traditionally, detecting regional and teleseismic events has required the use of an expensive multi-instrument seismic array; however in this work, we present DeepPick, a novel seismic detection algorithm capable of array-like detection performance from a single-trace. We achieve this performance through three novel steps: First, a high-fidelity dataset is constructed by pairing array-beam catalog arrival-times with single-trace waveforms from the reference instrument of the array. Second, an idealized characteristic function is created, with exponential peaks aligned to the cataloged arrival times. Third, a deep temporal convolutional neural network is employed to learn the complex non-linear filters required to transform the single-trace waveforms into corresponding idealized characteristic functions. The training data consists of all arrivals in the International Seismological Centre Database for seven seismic arrays over a five year window from 1 January 2010 to 1 January 2015, yielding a total training set of 608,362 detections. The test set consists of the same seven arrays over a one year window from 1 January 2015 to 1 January 2016. We report our results by training the algorithm on six of the arrays and testing it on the seventh, so as to demonstrate the generalization and transportability of the technique to new stations. Detection performance against this test set is outstanding, yielding significant improvements in recall over existing techniques. Fixing a type-I error rate of 0.001, the algorithm achieves an overall recall (true positive rate) of 56% against the 141,095 array-beam arrivals in the test set, yielding 78,802 correct detections. This is more than twice the 37,572 detections made by an STA/LTA detector over the same period, and represents a 35% improvement over the 58,515 detections made by a state-of-the-art kurtosis-based detector. Furthermore, DeepPick provides at least a 4 dB improvement in detector sensitivity across the board, and is more computationally efficient, with run-times an order of magnitude faster than either of the other techniques tested. These results demonstrate the potential of our algorithm to significantly enhance the effectiveness of the global treaty monitoring network. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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16 pages, 9787 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Automatic Building Extraction from Google Earth Images under Complex Backgrounds Based on Deep Instance Segmentation Network

by Qi Wen, Kaiyu Jiang, Wei Wang, Qingjie Liu, Qing Guo, Lingling Li and Ping Wang

Sensors 2019, 19(2), 333; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19020333 - 15 Jan 2019

Cited by 67 | Viewed by 7682

Abstract

Building damage accounts for a high percentage of post-natural disaster assessment. Extracting buildings from optical remote sensing images is of great significance for natural disaster reduction and assessment. Traditional methods mainly are semi-automatic methods which require human-computer interaction or rely on purely human interpretation. In this paper, inspired by the recently developed deep learning techniques, we propose an improved Mask Region Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) method that can detect the rotated bounding boxes of buildings and segment them from very complex backgrounds, simultaneously. The proposed method has two major improvements, making it very suitable to perform building extraction task. Firstly, instead of predicting horizontal rectangle bounding boxes of objects like many other detectors do, we intend to obtain the minimum enclosing rectangles of buildings by adding a new term: the principal directions of the rectangles θ. Secondly, a new layer by integrating advantages of both atrous convolution and inception block is designed and inserted into the segmentation branch of the Mask R-CNN to make the branch to learn more representative features. We test the proposed method on a newly collected large Google Earth remote sensing dataset with diverse buildings and very complex backgrounds. Experiments demonstrate that it can obtain promising results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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16 pages, 5893 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Online Prediction of Ship Behavior with Automatic Identification System Sensor Data Using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network

by Miao Gao, Guoyou Shi and Shuang Li

Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4211; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124211 - 30 Nov 2018

Cited by 101 | Viewed by 8168

Abstract

The real-time prediction of ship behavior plays an important role in navigation and intelligent collision avoidance systems. This study developed an online real-time ship behavior prediction model by constructing a bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network (BI-LSTM-RNN) that is suitable for automatic identification system (AIS) date and time sequential characteristics, and for online parameter adjustment. The bidirectional structure enhanced the relevance between historical and future data, thus improving the prediction accuracy. Through the “forget gate” of the long short-term memory (LSTM) unit, the common behavioral patterns were remembered and unique behaviors were forgotten, improving the universality of the model. The BI-LSTM-RNN was trained using 2015 AIS data from Tianjin Port waters. The results indicate that the BI-LSTM-RNN effectively predicted the navigational behaviors of ships. This study contributes significantly to the increased efficiency and safety of sea operations. The proposed method could potentially be applied as the predictive foundation for various intelligent systems, including intelligent collision avoidance, vessel route planning, operational efficiency estimation, and anomaly detection systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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13 pages, 2701 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Deep Learning Approach on Building Detection from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Images in Riverbank Monitoring

by Wuttichai Boonpook, Yumin Tan, Yinghua Ye, Peerapong Torteeka, Kritanai Torsri and Shengxian Dong

Sensors 2018, 18(11), 3921; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113921 - 14 Nov 2018

Cited by 53 | Viewed by 6470

Abstract

Buildings along riverbanks are likely to be affected by rising water levels, therefore the acquisition of accurate building information has great importance not only for riverbank environmental protection but also for dealing with emergency cases like flooding. UAV-based photographs are flexible and cloud-free compared to satellite images and can provide very high-resolution images up to centimeter level, while there exist great challenges in quickly and accurately detecting and extracting building from UAV images because there are usually too many details and distortions on UAV images. In this paper, a deep learning (DL)-based approach is proposed for more accurately extracting building information, in which the network architecture, SegNet, is used in the semantic segmentation after the network training on a completely labeled UAV image dataset covering multi-dimension urban settlement appearances along a riverbank area in Chongqing. The experiment results show that an excellent performance has been obtained in the detection of buildings from untrained locations with an average overall accuracy more than 90%. To verify the generality and advantage of the proposed method, the procedure is further evaluated by training and testing with another two open standard datasets which have a variety of building patterns and styles, and the final overall accuracies of building extraction are more than 93% and 95%, respectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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17 pages, 3416 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Segmentation and Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Airborne Laser Scanner Data

by Zhishuang Yang, Bo Tan, Huikun Pei and Wanshou Jiang

Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3347; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103347 - 7 Oct 2018

Cited by 62 | Viewed by 4179

Abstract

The classification of point clouds is a basic task in airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud processing. It is quite a challenge when facing complex observed scenes and irregular point distributions. In order to reduce the computational burden of the point-based classification method and improve the classification accuracy, we present a segmentation and multi-scale convolutional neural network-based classification method. Firstly, a three-step region-growing segmentation method was proposed to reduce both under-segmentation and over-segmentation. Then, a feature image generation method was used to transform the 3D neighborhood features of a point into a 2D image. Finally, feature images were treated as the input of a multi-scale convolutional neural network for training and testing tasks. In order to obtain performance comparisons with existing approaches, we evaluated our framework using the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Working Groups II/4 (ISPRS WG II/4) 3D labeling benchmark tests. The experiment result, which achieved 84.9% overall accuracy and 69.2% of average F1 scores, has a satisfactory performance over all participating approaches analyzed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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22 pages, 7063 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hyperspectral Image Classification with Capsule Network Using Limited Training Samples

by Fei Deng, Shengliang Pu, Xuehong Chen, Yusheng Shi, Ting Yuan and Shengyan Pu

Sensors 2018, 18(9), 3153; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18093153 - 18 Sep 2018

Cited by 135 | Viewed by 10143

Abstract

Deep learning techniques have boosted the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown superior performance to that of the conventional machine learning algorithms. Recently, a novel type of neural networks called capsule networks (CapsNets) was presented to improve the most advanced CNNs. In this paper, we present a modified two-layer CapsNet with limited training samples for HSI classification, which is inspired by the comparability and simplicity of the shallower deep learning models. The presented CapsNet is trained using two real HSI datasets, i.e., the PaviaU (PU) and SalinasA datasets, representing complex and simple datasets, respectively, and which are used to investigate the robustness or representation of every model or classifier. In addition, a comparable paradigm of network architecture design has been proposed for the comparison of CNN and CapsNet. Experiments demonstrate that CapsNet shows better accuracy and convergence behavior for the complex data than the state-of-the-art CNN. For CapsNet using the PU dataset, the Kappa coefficient, overall accuracy, and average accuracy are 0.9456, 95.90%, and 96.27%, respectively, compared to the corresponding values yielded by CNN of 0.9345, 95.11%, and 95.63%. Moreover, we observed that CapsNet has much higher confidence for the predicted probabilities. Subsequently, this finding was analyzed and discussed with probability maps and uncertainty analysis. In terms of the existing literature, CapsNet provides promising results and explicit merits in comparison with CNN and two baseline classifiers, i.e., random forests (RFs) and support vector machines (SVMs). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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Review

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39 pages, 1627 KiB

Open AccessReview

Survey of Deep-Learning Approaches for Remote Sensing Observation Enhancement

by Grigorios Tsagkatakis, Anastasia Aidini, Konstantina Fotiadou, Michalis Giannopoulos, Anastasia Pentari and Panagiotis Tsakalides

Sensors 2019, 19(18), 3929; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183929 - 12 Sep 2019

Cited by 108 | Viewed by 9435

Abstract

Deep Learning, and Deep Neural Networks in particular, have established themselves as the new norm in signal and data processing, achieving state-of-the-art performance in image, audio, and natural language understanding. In remote sensing, a large body of research has been devoted to the application of deep learning for typical supervised learning tasks such as classification. Less yet equally important effort has also been allocated to addressing the challenges associated with the enhancement of low-quality observations from remote sensing platforms. Addressing such channels is of paramount importance, both in itself, since high-altitude imaging, environmental conditions, and imaging systems trade-offs lead to low-quality observation, as well as to facilitate subsequent analysis, such as classification and detection. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of deep-learning methods for the enhancement of remote sensing observations, focusing on critical tasks including single and multi-band super-resolution, denoising, restoration, pan-sharpening, and fusion, among others. In addition to the detailed analysis and comparison of recently presented approaches, different research avenues which could be explored in the future are also discussed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning Remote Sensing Data)

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