Remote sensing applications have gained in popularity in recent years, which has resulted in vast amounts of data being produced on a daily basis. Managing and delivering large sets of data becomes extremely difficult and resource demanding for the data vendors, but even more for individual users and third party stakeholders. Hence, research in the field of efficient remote sensing data handling and manipulation has become a very active research topic (from both storage and communication perspectives). Driven by the rapid growth in the volume of optical satellite measurements, in this work we explore the lossy compression technique for multispectral satellite images. We give a comprehensive analysis of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) still-image intra coding part applied to the multispectral image data. Thereafter, we analyze the impact of the distortions introduced by the HEVC’s intra compression in the general case, as well as in the specific context of crop classification application. Results show that HEVC’s intra coding achieves better trade-off between compression gain and image quality, as compared to standard JPEG 2000 solution. On the other hand, this also reflects in the better performance of the designed pixel-based classifier in the analyzed crop classification task. We show that HEVC can obtain up to 150:1 compression ratio, when observing compression in the context of specific application, without significantly losing on classification performance compared to classifier trained and applied on raw data. In comparison, in order to maintain the same performance, JPEG 2000 allows compression ratio up to 70:1.

This note presents a fuzzy optimization of Gabor filter-based object and text detection. The derivation of a 2D Gabor filter and the guidelines for the fuzzification of the filter parameters are described. The fuzzy Gabor filter proved to be a robust text an object detection method in low-quality input images as extensively evaluated in the problem of license plate localization. The extended set of examples confirmed that the fuzzy optimized Gabor filter with adequately fuzzified parameters detected the desired license plate texture components and highly improved the object detection when compared to the classic Gabor filter. The robustness of the proposed approach was further demonstrated on other images of various origin containing text and different textures, captured using low-cost or modest quality acquisition procedures. The possibility to fine tune the fuzzification procedure to better suit certain applications offers the potential to further boost detection performance.

A new, simple, fast and effective method for moving object detection in outdoor environments, invariant to extreme illumination changes is presented as an improvement to the shading model method described in [8]. It is based on an analytical parameter introduced in the shading model, background updating technique and window processing.