Central to the looming paradigm shift toward data-intensive science, machine-learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, deep learning has proven to be both a major breakthrough and an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to everything? Or should we resist a black-box solution? These are controversial issues within the remote-sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote-sensing data analysis, review recent advances, and provide resources we hope will make deep learning in remote sensing seem ridiculously simple. More importantly, we encourage remote-sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented, large-scale, influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.

Over the last decade, neural networks have reached almost every field of science and become a crucial part of various real world applications. Due to the increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions has become more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over- or under-confidence, i.e. are badly calibrated. To overcome this, many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network’s prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and various approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. For that, a comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and irreducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for calibrating neural networks, and give an overview of existing baselines and available implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in the fields of medical image analysis, robotics, and earth observation give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in the practical applications of neural networks. Additionally, the practical limitations of uncertainty quantification methods in neural networks for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.

In recent years, vector-based machine learning algorithms, such as random forests, support vector machines, and 1-D convolutional neural networks, have shown promising results in hyperspectral image classification. Such methodologies, nevertheless, can lead to information loss in representing hyperspectral pixels, which intrinsically have a sequence-based data structure. A recurrent neural network (RNN), an important branch of the deep learning family, is mainly designed to handle sequential data. Can sequence-based RNN be an effective method of hyperspectral image classification? In this paper, we propose a novel RNN model that can effectively analyze hyperspectral pixels as sequential data and then determine information categories via network reasoning. As far as we know, this is the first time that an RNN framework has been proposed for hyperspectral image classification. Specifically, our RNN makes use of a newly proposed activation function, parametric rectified tanh (PRetanh), for hyperspectral sequential data analysis instead of the popular tanh or rectified linear unit. The proposed activation function makes it possible to use fairly high learning rates without the risk of divergence during the training procedure. Moreover, a modified gated recurrent unit, which uses PRetanh for hidden representation, is adopted to construct the recurrent layer in our network to efficiently process hyperspectral data and reduce the total number of parameters. Experimental results on three airborne hyperspectral images suggest competitive performance in the proposed mode. In addition, the proposed network architecture opens a new window for future research, showcasing the huge potential of deep recurrent networks for hyperspectral data analysis.

Hyperspectral imagery collected from airborne or satellite sources inevitably suffers from spectral variability, making it difficult for spectral unmixing to accurately estimate abundance maps. The classical unmixing model, the linear mixing model (LMM), generally fails to handle this sticky issue effectively. To this end, we propose a novel spectral mixture model, called the augmented linear mixing model (ALMM), to address spectral variability by applying a data-driven learning strategy in inverse problems of hyperspectral unmixing. The proposed approach models the main spectral variability (i.e., scaling factors) generated by variations in illumination or typography separately by means of the endmember dictionary. It then models other spectral variabilities caused by environmental conditions (e.g., local temperature and humidity, atmospheric effects) and instrumental configurations (e.g., sensor noise), as well as material nonlinear mixing effects, by introducing a spectral variability dictionary. To effectively run the data-driven learning strategy, we also propose a reasonable prior knowledge for the spectral variability dictionary, whose atoms are assumed to be low-coherent with spectral signatures of endmembers, which leads to a well-known low-coherence dictionary learning problem. Thus, a dictionary learning technique is embedded in the framework of spectral unmixing so that the algorithm can learn the spectral variability dictionary and estimate the abundance maps simultaneously. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets are performed to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with previous state-of-the-art methods.

Change detection is one of the central problems in earth observation and was extensively investigated over recent decades. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent convolutional neural network (ReCNN) architecture, which is trained to learn a joint spectral-spatial-temporal feature representation in a unified framework for change detection in multispectral images. To this end, we bring together a convolutional neural network and a recurrent neural network into one end-to-end network. The former is able to generate rich spectral-spatial feature representations, while the latter effectively analyzes temporal dependence in bitemporal images. In comparison with previous approaches to change detection, the proposed network architecture possesses three distinctive properties: 1) it is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most existing methods whose components are separately trained or computed; 2) it naturally harnesses spatial information that has been proven to be beneficial to change detection task; and 3) it is capable of adaptively learning the temporal dependence between multitemporal images, unlike most of the algorithms that use fairly simple operation like image differencing or stacking. As far as we know, this is the first time that a recurrent convolutional network architecture has been proposed for multitemporal remote sensing image analysis. The proposed network is validated on real multispectral data sets. Both visual and quantitative analyses of the experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in the proposed mode.

Optical remote sensing imagery is at the core of many Earth observation activities. The regular, consistent and global-scale nature of the satellite data is exploited in many applications, such as cropland monitoring, climate change assessment, land-cover and land-use classification, and disaster assessment. However, one main problem severely affects the temporal and spatial availability of surface observations, namely cloud cover. The task of removing clouds from optical images has been subject of studies since decades. The advent of the Big Data era in satellite remote sensing opens new possibilities for tackling the problem using powerful data-driven deep learning methods.