Accurate crop type and crop growth stage maps are essential for agricultural monitoring and ensuring food security. A wide variety of airborne and spaceborne sensors now provide high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution images, which are vital for crop mapping and monitoring. Crop type and its growth stage can be characterized by spectral, spatial, and temporal features. The classification of crop types and growth stages has been explored in previous studies as independent tasks. However, the growth stages of a crop are an important factor in identifying the crop and vice-versa. A multi-task learning (MTL) framework is proposed in this work to classify the crop type and its growth stages simultaneously. A hybrid convolutional neural network and temporal convolutional network (CNN-TCN) architecture is presented to process a multitude of features relevant to the tasks. To learn the spatio–spectral features, we fed the hyperspectral input to 3D convolution blocks and multispectral input was given into 2D convolution blocks. We reformulate these multi-channel features into two dimensions and feed them into the temporal convolutional neural network. Subsequently, we use two fully connected branches for each task. MTL frameworks were developed for multispectral (Mx), hyperspectral (Hx), and the combination of Hx and Mx (Hx-Mx) images to model crop type and crop growth stage classification. Results reveal that the proposed model for Hx-Mx outperformed the best single-task model by 13% and 8% in crop growth stage and crop type classification, respectively. Compared to single-task models, the proposed model can exploit the high spectral information from Hx images and high spatial information from Mx images, making the proposed model more useful for unmanned-aerial-vehicle-based crop mapping.
The generalized bilinear model (GBM) has been one of the most representative models for nonlinear unmixing of hyperspectral images (HSI), which can consider the second-order scattering of photons. Recently, robust GBM-low-rank representation (RGBM-LRR) for nonlinear unmixing of HSI has been introduced to capture the spatial correlation of HSI using LRR with nuclear norm minimization (NNM). However, NNM is used to approximate the matrix rank by shrinkage all singular values equally. The singular values have distinct physical significance in many real applications, and NNM may not be able to estimate the matrix rank accurately. To overcome the above issue, a robust GBM with a weighted low-rank representation (RGBM-WLRR) approach is proposed using weighted nuclear norm minimization, which mitigates the penalty on larger singular values by assigning a small weight, so the corresponding shrinkage is small and also takes serious shrinkage on small singular values by assigning larger weights to them. The proposed model is solved using an iterative alternating direction method of the multipliers. A series of experiments with real datasets and a simulated HSI with varying rank and signal-to-noise ratio reveals that RGBM-WLRR performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of signal-to-reconstruction error, root-mean-square error, and spectral angle distance.
A four-directional total variation technique is proposed to encapsulate the spatial contextual information for sparse hyperspectral image (HSI) unmixing. Traditional sparse total variation techniques explore gradient information along with the horizontal and vertical directions. As a result, spatial disparity due to high noise levels within the neighboring pixels are not considered while unmixing. Moreover, oversmoothing due to total variation may depreciate the spatial details in the abundance map. In this context, we propose a four-directional regularization technique (Sparse Unmixing with Splitting Augmented Lagrangian: Four-Directional Total Variation, SUnSAL-4DTV) for sparse unmixing. The four-directional total variation scheme is transformed into the fast-Fourier-transform domain to reduce the higher computational requirements. An alternating-direction-method-of-multipliers-based iterative scheme is proposed for solving the large-scale optimization problem. An adaptive scheme is introduced to update the regularization parameters to ensure faster convergence. Extensive numerical simulations were conducted on both simulated and real hyperspectral datasets to demonstrate the robustness of proposed technique. Comparative analysis on noisy (low signal-to-noise-ratio) HSIs shows the robustness of SUnSAL-4DTV over the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Bilateral filter (BF) theory is applied to integrate spatial contextual information into the spectral domain for improving the accuracy of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed classification framework is a two-stage process. First, an edge-preserved smoothing is carried out on a hyperspectral image (HSI). Then, the SVM multiclass classifier is applied on the smoothed HSI. One of the advantages of the BF-based implementation is that it considers the spatial as well as spectral closeness for smoothing the HSI. Therefore, the proposed method provides better smoothing in the homogeneous region and preserves the image details, which in turn improves the separability between the classes. The performance of the proposed method is tested using benchmark HSIs obtained from the airborne-visible-infrared-imaging-spectrometer (AVIRIS) and the reflective-optics-system-imaging-spectrometer (ROSIS) sensors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the edge-preserved filtering in the classification of the HSI. Average accuracies (with 10% training samples) of the proposed classification framework are 99.04%, 98.11%, and 96.42% for AVIRIS–Salinas, ROSIS–Pavia University, and AVIRIS–Indian Pines images, respectively. Since the proposed method follows a combination of BF and the SVM formulations, it will be quite simple and practical to implement in real applications.
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