Structured Output SVM for Remote Sensing Image Classification
Traditional kernel classifiers assume independence among the classification outputs. As a consequence, each misclassification receives the same weight in the loss function. Moreover, the kernel function only takes into account the similarity between input values and ignores possible relationships between the classes to be predicted. These assumptions are not consistent for most of real-life problems. In the particular case of remote sensing data, this is not a good assumption either. Segmentation of images acquired by airborne or satellite sensors is a very active field of research in which one tries to classify a pixel into a predefined set of classes of interest (e.g. water, grass, trees,…
Unsupervised change detection with kernels
In this paper an unsupervised approach to change detection relying on kernels is introduced. Kernel based clustering is used to partition a selected subset of pixels representing both changed and unchanged areas. Once the optimal clustering is obtained the estimated representatives (centroids) of each group are used to assign the class membership to all others pixels composing the multitemporal scenes. Different approaches of considering the multitemporal information are considered with accent on the computation of the difference image directly in the feature spaces. For this purpose a difference kernel approach is successfully adopted. Finally an effective way to cope with the estimation o…
Learning the relevant image features with multiple kernels
This paper proposes to learn the relevant features of remote sensing images for automatic spatio-spectral classification with the automatic optimization of multiple kernels. The method consists of building dedicated kernels for different sets of bands, contextual or textural features. The optimal linear combination of kernels is optimized through gradient descent on the support vector machine (SVM) objective function. Since a na¨ive implementation is computationally demanding, we propose an efficient model selection procedure based on kernel alignment. The result is a weight — learned from the data — for each kernel where both relevant and meaningless image features emerge after training. E…
Cluster-based active learning for compact image classification
In this paper, we consider active sampling to label pixels grouped with hierarchical clustering. The objective of the method is to match the data relationships discovered by the clustering algorithm with the user's desired class semantics. The first is represented as a complete tree to be pruned and the second is iteratively provided by the user. The active learning algorithm proposed searches the pruning of the tree that best matches the labels of the sampled points. By choosing the part of the tree to sample from according to current pruning's uncertainty, sampling is focused on most uncertain clusters. This way, large clusters for which the class membership is already fixed are no longer…
Domain separation for efficient adaptive active learning
This paper proposes a procedure aimed at efficiently adapting a classifier trained on a source image to a similar target image. The adaptation is carried out through active queries in the target domain following a strategy particularly designed for the case where class distributions have shifted between the two images. We first suggest a pre-selection of candidate pixels issued from the target image by keeping only those samples appearing to be lying in a region of the input space not yet covered by the existing ground truth (source domain pixels). Then, exploiting a classifier integrating instance weights, active queries are performed on the target image. As the inclusion to the training s…
A survey of active learning algorithms for supervised remote sensing image classification
Defining an efficient training set is one of the most delicate phases for the success of remote sensing image classification routines. The complexity of the problem, the limited temporal and financial resources, as well as the high intraclass variance can make an algorithm fail if it is trained with a suboptimal dataset. Active learning aims at building efficient training sets by iteratively improving the model performance through sampling. A user-defined heuristic ranks the unlabeled pixels according to a function of the uncertainty of their class membership and then the user is asked to provide labels for the most uncertain pixels. This paper reviews and tests the main families of active …
Active Learning for Monitoring Network Optimization
Kernel-based active learning strategies were studied for the optimization of environmental monitoring networks. This chapter introduces the basic machine learning algorithms originated in the statistical learning theory of Vapnik (1998). Active learning is closer to an optimization done using sequential Gaussian simulations. The chapter presents the general ideas of statistical learning from data. It derives the basics of kernel-based support vector algorithms. The active learning framework is presented and machine learning extensions for active learning are described in the chapter. Kernel-based active learning strategies are tested on real case studies. The chapter explores the use of a c…