Kiran K. Mantripragada

Kiran Mantripragada, Faisal Z. Qureshi

Image segmentation is a fundamental step for the interpretation of Remote Sensing Images. Clustering or segmentation methods usually precede the classification task and are used as support tools for manual labeling. The most common algorithms, such as k-means, mean-shift, and MRS, require an extra manual step to find the scale parameter. The segmentation results are severely affected if the parameters are not correctly tuned and diverge from the optimal values. Additionally, the search for the optimal scale is a costly task, as it requires a comprehensive hyper-parameter search. This paper proposes and evaluates a method for segmentation of Hyperspectral Images using the Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model. Our model can self-regulate the parameters until it finds the optimal values of scale and the number of clusters in a given dataset. The results demonstrate the potential of our method to find objects in a Hyperspectral Image while bypassing the burden of manual search of the optimal parameters. In addition, our model also produces similar results on noisy datasets, while previous research usually required a pre-processing task for noise reduction and spectral smoothing.

Soham Chitnis, Kiran Mantripragada, Faisal Z. Qureshi

The hyperspectral pixel unmixing aims to find the underlying materials (endmembers) and their proportions (abundances) in pixels of a hyperspectral image. This work extends the Latent Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (LDVAE) pixel unmixing scheme by taking into account local spatial context while performing pixel unmixing. The proposed method uses an isotropic convolutional neural network with spatial attention to encode pixels as a dirichlet distribution over endmembers. We have evaluated our model on Samson, Hydice Urban, Cuprite, and OnTech-HSI-Syn-21 datasets. Our model also leverages the transfer learning paradigm for Cuprite Dataset, where we train the model on synthetic data and evaluate it on the real-world data. The results suggest that incorporating spatial context improves both endmember extraction and abundance estimation.

Kiran Mantripragada, Phuong D. Dao, Yuhong He et al.

This paper presents a systematic study of the effects of hyperspectral pixel dimensionality reduction on the pixel classification task. We use five dimensionality reduction methods -- PCA, KPCA, ICA, AE, and DAE -- to compress 301-dimensional hyperspectral pixels. Compressed pixels are subsequently used to perform pixel classifications. Pixel classification accuracies together with compression method, compression rates, and reconstruction errors provide a new lens to study the suitability of a compression method for the task of pixel classification. We use three high-resolution hyperspectral image datasets, representing three common landscape types (i.e. urban, transitional suburban, and forests) collected by the Remote Sensing and Spatial Ecosystem Modeling laboratory of the University of Toronto. We found that PCA, KPCA, and ICA post greater signal reconstruction capability; however, when compression rates are more than 90\% these methods show lower classification scores. AE and DAE methods post better classification accuracy at 95\% compression rate, however their performance drops as compression rate approaches 97\%. Our results suggest that both the compression method and the compression rate are important considerations when designing a hyperspectral pixel classification pipeline.