Earth observation using multisensor data is drawing increasing attention. Fusing remotely sensed hyperspectral imagery and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data helps to increase application performance. In this article, joint classification of hyperspectral imagery and LiDAR data is investigated using an effective hierarchical random walk network (HRWN). In the proposed HRWN, a dual-tunnel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is first developed to capture spectral and spatial features. A pixelwise affinity branch is proposed to capture the relationships between classes with different elevation information from LiDAR data and confirm the spatial contrast of classification. Then in the designed hierarchical random walk layer, the predicted distribution of dual-tunnel CNN serves as global prior while pixelwise affinity reflects the local similarity of pixel pairs, which enforce spatial consistency in the deeper layers of networks. Finally, a classification map is obtained by calculating the probability distribution. Experimental results validated with three real multisensor remote sensing data demonstrate that the proposed HRWN significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. For example, the two branches CNN classifier achieves an accuracy of 88.91% on the University of Houston campus data set, while the proposed HRWN classifier obtains an accuracy of 93.61%, resulting in an improvement of approximately 5%.

Hyperspectral image super-resolution by fusing high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) and low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI) aims at reconstructing high resolution spatial-spectral information of the scene. Existing methods mostly based on spectral unmixing and sparse representation are often developed from a low-level vision task perspective, they cannot sufficiently make use of the spatial and spectral priors available from higher-level analysis. To this issue, this paper proposes a novel HSI super-resolution method that fully considers the spatial/spectral subspace low-rank relationships between available HR-MSI/LR-HSI and latent HSI. Specifically, it relies on a new subspace clustering method named “structured sparse low-rank representation” (SSLRR), to represent the data samples as linear combinations of the bases in a given dictionary, where the sparse structure is induced by low-rank factorization for the affinity matrix. Then we exploit the proposed SSLRR model to learn the SSLRR along spatial/spectral domain from the MSI/HSI inputs. By using the learned spatial and spectral low-rank structures, we formulate the proposed HSI super-resolution model as a variational optimization problem, which can be readily solved by the ADMM algorithm. Compared with state-of-the-art hyperspectral super-resolution methods, the proposed method shows better performance on three benchmark datasets in terms of both visual and quantitative evaluatiaon.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) enjoys great advantages over more traditional image types for various applications due to the extra knowledge available. For the nonideal optical and electronic devices, HSI is always corrupted by various noises, such as Gaussian noise, deadlines, and stripings. The global correlation across spectrum (GCS) and nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) over space are two important characteristics for HSI. In this paper, a nonlocal low-rank regularized CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor decomposition (NLR-CPTD) is proposed to fully utilize these two intrinsic priors. To make the rank estimation more accurate, a new manner of rank determination for the NLR-CPTD model is proposed. The intrinsic GCS and NSS priors can be efficiently explored under the low-rank regularized CPTD to avoid tensor rank estimation bias for denoising performance. Then, the proposed HSI denoising model is performed on tensors formed by nonlocal similar patches within an HSI. The alternating direction method of multipliers-based optimization technique is designed to solve the minimum problem. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm can greatly promote the denoising performance of an HSI in various quality assessments.

Existing methods for tensor completion (TC) have limited ability for characterizing low-rank (LR) structures. To depict the complex hierarchical knowledge with implicit sparsity attributes hidden in a tensor, we propose a new multilayer sparsity-based tensor decomposition (MLSTD) for the low-rank tensor completion (LRTC). The method encodes the structured sparsity of a tensor by the multiple-layer representation. Specifically, we use the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) model to decompose a tensor into an ensemble of the sum of rank-1 tensors, and the number of rank-1 components is easily interpreted as the first-layer sparsity measure. Presumably, the factor matrices are smooth since local piecewise property exists in within-mode correlation. In subspace, the local smoothness can be regarded as the second-layer sparsity. To describe the refined structures of factor/subspace sparsity, we introduce a new sparsity insight of subspace smoothness: a self-adaptive low-rank matrix factorization (LRMF) scheme, called the third-layer sparsity. By the progressive description of the sparsity structure, we formulate an MLSTD model and embed it into the LRTC problem. Then, an effective alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is designed for the MLSTD minimization problem. Various experiments in RGB images, hyperspectral images (HSIs), and videos substantiate that the proposed LRTC methods are superior to state-of-the-art methods.

Conventional tensor completion (TC) methods generally assume that the sparsity of tensor-valued data lies in the global subspace. The so-called global sparsity prior is measured by the tensor nuclear norm. Such assumption is not reliable in recovering low-rank (LR) tensor data, especially when considerable elements of data are missing. To mitigate this weakness, this article presents an enhanced sparsity prior model for LRTC using both local and global sparsity information in a latent LR tensor. In specific, we adopt a doubly weighted strategy for nuclear norm along each mode to characterize global sparsity prior of tensor. Different from traditional tensor-based local sparsity description, the proposed factor gradient sparsity prior in the Tucker decomposition model describes the underlying subspace local smoothness in real-world tensor objects, which simultaneously characterizes local piecewise structure over all dimensions. Moreover, there is no need to minimize the rank of a tensor for the proposed local sparsity prior. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, real-world hyperspectral images, and face modeling data demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of prediction capability and efficiency.

Remote sensing using multisensor platforms has been systematically applied for monitoring and optimizing human activities. Several advanced techniques have been developed to enhance and extract the spatially and spectrally semantic information in the hyperspectral image (HSI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data processing and analysis. However, an abundance of redundant information and sometimes a lack of discriminative features reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of multisource classification methods. This article proposes a fractional Gabor convolutional network (FGCN), focusing on efficient feature fusion and comprehensive feature extraction. First, the proposed FGCN uses Octave convolution layers to perform multisource information fusion and preserve discriminative information. Second, fractional Gabor convolutional (FGC) layers are proposed to extract multiscale, multidirectional, and semantic change features. The completeness and discrimination of the multisource features using different FGC kernels are improved, which yield robust feature extraction against semantic changes. Finally, the fractional Gabor feature and spectral feature are combined with two weighting factors which can be learned during the network training. Experimental results and comparisons with state-of-the-art multisource classification methods indicate the effectiveness of the proposed FGCN. With the FGCN, we can obtain an 89.90% overall accuracy on the challenging Muufl Gulfport (MUUFL) data set, with an improvement of 3% over state-of-the-art methods.