James M. Murphy

Sam L. Polk, Aland H. Y. Chan, Kangning Cui et al.

Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is an introduced fungal disease that is causing the widespread death of ash trees across Europe. Remote sensing hyperspectral images encode rich structure that has been exploited for the detection of dieback disease in ash trees using supervised machine learning techniques. However, to understand the state of forest health at landscape-scale, accurate unsupervised approaches are needed. This article investigates the use of the unsupervised Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (D-VIS) clustering algorithm for the detection of ash dieback disease in a forest site near Cambridge, United Kingdom. The unsupervised clustering presented in this work has high overlap with the supervised classification of previous work on this scene (overall accuracy = 71%). Thus, unsupervised learning may be used for the remote detection of ash dieback disease without the need for expert labeling.

Kangning Cui, Ruoning Li, Sam L. Polk et al.

Hyperspectral images, which store a hundred or more spectral bands of reflectance, have become an important data source in natural and social sciences. Hyperspectral images are often generated in large quantities at a relatively coarse spatial resolution. As such, unsupervised machine learning algorithms incorporating known structure in hyperspectral imagery are needed to analyze these images automatically. This work introduces the Spatial-Spectral Image Reconstruction and Clustering with Diffusion Geometry (DSIRC) algorithm for partitioning highly mixed hyperspectral images. DSIRC reduces measurement noise through a shape-adaptive reconstruction procedure. In particular, for each pixel, DSIRC locates spectrally correlated pixels within a data-adaptive spatial neighborhood and reconstructs that pixel's spectral signature using those of its neighbors. DSIRC then locates high-density, high-purity pixels far in diffusion distance (a data-dependent distance metric) from other high-density, high-purity pixels and treats these as cluster exemplars, giving each a unique label. Non-modal pixels are assigned the label of their diffusion distance-nearest neighbor of higher density and purity that is already labeled. Strong numerical results indicate that incorporating spatial information through image reconstruction substantially improves the performance of pixel-wise clustering.

Sam L. Polk, Kangning Cui, Robert J. Plemmons et al.

Hyperspectral images encode rich structure that can be exploited for material discrimination by machine learning algorithms. This article introduces the Active Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (ADVIS) for active material discrimination. ADVIS selects high-purity, high-density pixels that are far in diffusion distance (a data-dependent metric) from other high-purity, high-density pixels in the hyperspectral image. The ground truth labels of these pixels are queried and propagated to the rest of the image. The ADVIS active learning algorithm is shown to strongly outperform its fully unsupervised clustering algorithm counterpart, suggesting that the incorporation of a very small number of carefully-selected ground truth labels can result in substantially superior material discrimination in hyperspectral images.

James M. Murphy, Mauro Maggioni

The problem of unsupervised learning and segmentation of hyperspectral images is a significant challenge in remote sensing. The high dimensionality of hyperspectral data, presence of substantial noise, and overlap of classes all contribute to the difficulty of automatically clustering and segmenting hyperspectral images. We propose an unsupervised learning technique called spectral-spatial diffusion learning (DLSS) that combines a geometric estimation of class modes with a diffusion-inspired labeling that incorporates both spectral and spatial information. The mode estimation incorporates the geometry of the hyperspectral data by using diffusion distance to promote learning a unique mode from each class. These class modes are then used to label all points by a joint spectral-spatial nonlinear diffusion process. A related variation of DLSS is also discussed, which enables active learning by requesting labels for a very small number of well-chosen pixels, dramatically boosting overall clustering results. Extensive experimental analysis demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed methods against benchmark and state-of-the-art hyperspectral analysis techniques on a variety of real datasets, their robustness to choices of parameters, and their low computational complexity.