Morphological profiles (MPs) have been proposed in recent literature as aiding tools to achieve better results for classification of remotely sensed data. MPs are in general built using features containing most of the information content of the data, such as the components derived from principal component analysis (PCA). Recently, nonlinear PCA (NLPCA), performed by autoassociative neural network, has emerged as a good unsupervised technique to fit the information content of hyperspectral data into few components. The aim of this letter is to investigate the classification accuracies obtained using extended MPs built from the features of NPCA. A comparison of the two approaches has been validated on two different data sets having different spatial and spectral resolutions/coverages, over the same ground truth, and also using two different classification algorithms. The results show that NLPCA permits one to obtain better classification accuracies than using linear PCA.

Hyperspectral remote sensing is based on measuring the scattered and reflected electromagnetic signals from the Earth’s surface emitted by the Sun. The received radiance at the sensor is usually degraded by atmospheric effects and instrumental (sensor) noises which include thermal (Johnson) noise, quantization noise, and shot (photon) noise. Noise reduction is often considered as a preprocessing step for hyperspectral imagery. In the past decade, hyperspectral noise reduction techniques have evolved substantially from two dimensional bandwise techniques to three dimensional ones, and varieties of low-rank methods have been forwarded to improve the signal to noise ratio of the observed data. Despite all the developments and advances, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of these techniques and their impact on hyperspectral imagery applications. In this paper, we address the following two main issues; (1) Providing an overview of the techniques developed in the past decade for hyperspectral image noise reduction; (2) Discussing the performance of these techniques by applying them as a preprocessing step to improve a hyperspectral image analysis task, i.e., classification. Additionally, this paper discusses about the hyperspectral image modeling and denoising challenges. Furthermore, different noise types that exist in hyperspectral images have been described. The denoising experiments have confirmed the advantages of the use of low-rank denoising techniques compared to the other denoising techniques in terms of signal to noise ratio and spectral angle distance. In the classification experiments, classification accuracies have improved when denoising techniques have been applied as a preprocessing step.

The pansharpening process has the purpose of building a high-resolution multispectral image by fusing low spatial resolution multispectral and high-resolution panchromatic observations. A very credited method to pursue this goal relies upon the injection of details extracted from the panchromatic image into an upsampled version of the low-resolution multispectral image. In this letter, we compare two different injection methodologies and motivate the superiority of contrast-based methods both by physical consideration and by numerical tests carried out on remotely sensed data acquired by IKONOS and Quickbird sensors.

Neural networks (NNs) are recognized as very effective techniques when facing complex retrieval tasks in remote sensing. In this paper, the potential of NNs has been applied in solving the unmixing problem in hyperspectral data. In its complete form, the processing scheme uses an NN architecture consisting of two stages: the first stage reduces the dimension of the input vector, while the second stage performs the mapping from the reduced input vector to the abundance percentages. The dimensionality reduction is performed by the so-called autoassociative NNs, which yield a nonlinear principal component analysis of the data. The evaluation of the whole performance is carried out for different sets of experimental data. The first one is provided by the Airborne Hyperspectral Scanner. The second set consists of images from the Compact High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on board the Project for On-Board Autonomy satellite, and it includes multiangle and multitemporal acquisitions. The third set is represented by Airborne Visible/InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer measurements. A quantitative performance analysis has been carried out in terms of effectiveness in the dimensionality reduction phase and in terms of the accuracy in the final estimation. The results obtained, when compared with those produced by appropriate benchmark techniques, show the advantages of this approach.

The 2008 Data Fusion Contest organized by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Data Fusion Technical Committee deals with the classification of high-resolution hyperspectral data from an urban area. Unlike in the previous issues of the contest, the goal was not only to identify the best algorithm but also to provide a collaborative effort: The decision fusion of the best individual algorithms was aiming at further improving the classification performances, and the best algorithms were ranked according to their relative contribution to the decision fusion. This paper presents the five awarded algorithms and the conclusions of the contest, stressing the importance of decision fusion, dimension reduction, and supervised classification methods, such as neural networks and support vector machines.

International audienceThis article presents a novel method for the enhancement of the spatial quality of hyperspectral (HS) images through the use of a high resolution panchromatic (PAN) image. Due to the high number of bands, the application of a pan-sharpening technique to HS images may result in an increase of the computational load and complexity. Thus a dimensionality reduction preprocess, compressing the original number of measurements into a lower dimensional space, becomes mandatory. To solve this problem, we propose a pan-sharpening technique combining both dimensionality reduction and fusion, making use of non-linear principal component analysis (NLPCA) and Indusion, respectively, to enhance the spatial resolution of a HS image. We have tested the proposed algorithm on HS images obtained from CHRIS-Proba sensor and PAN image obtained from World view 2 and demonstrated that a reduction using NLPCA does not result in any significant degradation in the pan-sharpening results