Juan Marcos Ramírez

B. Cung, T. Jin, J. Ramirez et al.

Clustering is the problem of separating a set of objects into groups (called clusters) so that objects within the same cluster are more similar to each other than to those in different clusters. Spectral clustering is a now well-known method for clustering which utilizes the spectrum of the data similarity matrix to perform this separation. Since the method relies on solving an eigenvector problem, it is computationally expensive for large datasets. To overcome this constraint, approximation methods have been developed which aim to reduce running time while maintaining accurate classification. In this article, we summarize and experimentally evaluate several approximation methods for spectral clustering. From an applications standpoint, we employ spectral clustering to solve the so-called attrition problem, where one aims to identify from a set of employees those who are likely to voluntarily leave the company from those who are not. Our study sheds light on the empirical performance of existing approximate spectral clustering methods and shows the applicability of these methods in an important business optimization related problem.

Juan Marcos Ramírez, José Ignacio Martínez Torre, Henry Arguello Fuentes

Image fusion aims at estimating a high-resolution spectral image from a low-spatial-resolution hyperspectral image and a low-spectral-resolution multispectral image. In this regard, compressive spectral imaging (CSI) has emerged as an acquisition framework that captures the relevant information of spectral images using a reduced number of measurements. Recently, various image fusion methods from CSI measurements have been proposed. However, these methods exhibit high running times and face the challenging task of choosing sparsity-inducing bases. In this paper, a deep network under the algorithm unrolling approach is proposed for fusing spectral images from compressive measurements. This architecture, dubbed LADMM-Net, casts each iteration of a linearized version of the alternating direction method of multipliers into a processing layer whose concatenation deploys a deep network. The linearized approach enables obtaining fusion estimates without resorting to costly matrix inversions. Furthermore, this approach exploits the benefits of learnable transforms to estimate the image details included in both the auxiliary variable and the Lagrange multiplier. Finally, the performance of the proposed technique is evaluated on two spectral image databases and one dataset captured at the laboratory. Extensive simulations show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches that fuse spectral images from compressive measurements.

Juan Ramírez, Héctor Vargas, José Ignacio Martínez et al.

In remote sensing, hyperspectral (HS) and multispectral (MS) image fusion have emerged as a synthesis tool to improve the data set resolution. However, conventional image fusion methods typically degrade the performance of the land cover classification. In this paper, a feature fusion method from HS and MS images for pixel-based classification is proposed. More precisely, the proposed method first extracts spatial features from the MS image using morphological profiles. Then, the feature fusion model assumes that both the extracted morphological profiles and the HS image can be described as a feature matrix lying in different subspaces. An algorithm based on combining alternating optimization (AO) and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is developed to solve efficiently the feature fusion problem. Finally, extensive simulations were run to evaluate the performance of the proposed feature fusion approach for two data sets. In general, the proposed approach exhibits a competitive performance compared to other feature extraction methods.