Luı́s B. Almeida

Luís Almeida, Inês Dutra, Francesco Renna

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental computer vision task with a vast number of applications. State of the art methods increasingly rely on deep learning models, known to incorrectly estimate uncertainty and being overconfident in predictions, especially in data not seen during training. This is particularly problematic in semantic segmentation due to inherent class imbalance. Popular uncertainty quantification approaches are task-agnostic and fail to leverage spatial pixel correlations in uncertainty estimates, crucial in this task. In this work, a novel training methodology specifically designed for semantic segmentation is presented. Training samples are weighted by instance-wise uncertainty masks computed by an ensemble. This is shown to increase performance on minority classes, boost model generalization and robustness to domain-shift when compared to using the inverse of class proportions or no class weights at all. This method addresses the challenges of class imbalance and uncertainty estimation in semantic segmentation, potentially enhancing model performance and reliability across various applications.

Miguel Simões, José Bioucas-Dias, Luis B. Almeida

Many of the algorithms used to solve minimization problems with sparsity-inducing regularizers are generic in the sense that they do not take into account the sparsity of the solution in any particular way. However, algorithms known as semismooth Newton are able to take advantage of this sparsity to accelerate their convergence. We show how to extend these algorithms in different directions, and study the convergence of the resulting algorithms by showing that they are a particular case of an extension of the well-known Krasnosel'skiĭ--Mann scheme.

Laetitia Loncan, Luis B. Almeida, José M. Bioucas-Dias et al.

Pansharpening aims at fusing a panchromatic image with a multispectral one, to generate an image with the high spatial resolution of the former and the high spectral resolution of the latter. In the last decade, many algorithms have been presented in the literature for pansharpening using multispectral data. With the increasing availability of hyperspectral systems, these methods are now being adapted to hyperspectral images. In this work, we compare new pansharpening techniques designed for hyperspectral data with some of the state of the art methods for multispectral pansharpening, which have been adapted for hyperspectral data. Eleven methods from different classes (component substitution, multiresolution analysis, hybrid, Bayesian and matrix factorization) are analyzed. These methods are applied to three datasets and their effectiveness and robustness are evaluated with widely used performance indicators. In addition, all the pansharpening techniques considered in this paper have been implemented in a MATLAB toolbox that is made available to the community.

Miguel Simões, José Bioucas-Dias, Luis B. Almeida et al.

Hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSIs) usually have high spectral resolution and low spatial resolution. Conversely, multispectral images (MSIs) usually have low spectral and high spatial resolutions. The problem of inferring images which combine the high spectral and high spatial resolutions of HSIs and MSIs, respectively, is a data fusion problem that has been the focus of recent active research due to the increasing availability of HSIs and MSIs retrieved from the same geographical area. We formulate this problem as the minimization of a convex objective function containing two quadratic data-fitting terms and an edge-preserving regularizer. The data-fitting terms account for blur, different resolutions, and additive noise. The regularizer, a form of vector Total Variation, promotes piecewise-smooth solutions with discontinuities aligned across the hyperspectral bands. The downsampling operator accounting for the different spatial resolutions, the non-quadratic and non-smooth nature of the regularizer, and the very large size of the HSI to be estimated lead to a hard optimization problem. We deal with these difficulties by exploiting the fact that HSIs generally "live" in a low-dimensional subspace and by tailoring the Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage Algorithm (SALSA), which is an instance of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), to this optimization problem, by means of a convenient variable splitting. The spatial blur and the spectral linear operators linked, respectively, with the HSI and MSI acquisition processes are also estimated, and we obtain an effective algorithm that outperforms the state-of-the-art, as illustrated in a series of experiments with simulated and real-life data.

Miguel Simões, José Bioucas-Dias, Luis B. Almeida et al.

Hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSIs) are characterized by having a low spatial resolution and a high spectral resolution, whereas multispectral images (MSIs) are characterized by low spectral and high spatial resolutions. These complementary characteristics have stimulated active research in the inference of images with high spatial and spectral resolutions from HSI-MSI pairs. In this paper, we formulate this data fusion problem as the minimization of a convex objective function containing two data-fitting terms and an edge-preserving regularizer. The data-fitting terms are quadratic and account for blur, different spatial resolutions, and additive noise; the regularizer, a form of vector Total Variation, promotes aligned discontinuities across the reconstructed hyperspectral bands. The optimization described above is rather hard, owing to its non-diagonalizable linear operators, to the non-quadratic and non-smooth nature of the regularizer, and to the very large size of the image to be inferred. We tackle these difficulties by tailoring the Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage Algorithm (SALSA)---an instance of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)---to this optimization problem. By using a convenient variable splitting and by exploiting the fact that HSIs generally "live" in a low-dimensional subspace, we obtain an effective algorithm that yields state-of-the-art results, as illustrated by experiments.