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  • 1
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: As training samples are not always identically distributed with the clutter in the cell under test (CUT) in heterogeneous environments, the estimated clutter covariance matrix for space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is not accurate, which degrades the performance of STAP. To improve the performance of STAP in heterogeneous environments, this letter proposes a novel training sample selection algorithm to estimate the covariance matrix. Based on the subaperture smoothing techniques, subapertures' covariance matrices are estimated, which are used to measure the similarities between the clutter covariance matrix of the CUT and the clutter covariance matrices of the training samples. Training samples whose clutter covariance matrices are similar to that of the CUT are selected, leading to a better estimation of the clutter covariance matrix, and the performance of STAP improves. Experimental results confirm the performance of the proposed algorithm.
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  • 2
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: In this letter, we develop a novel framework of leveraging weakly supervised learning techniques to efficiently detect targets from remote sensing images, which enables us to reduce the tedious manual annotation for collecting training data while maintaining the detection accuracy to large extent. The proposed framework consists of a weakly supervised training procedure to yield the detectors and an effective scheme to detect targets from testing images. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmarks which have different spatial resolutions and contain different types of targets as well as the comparisons with traditional supervised learning schemes demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
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  • 3
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Climate and land–atmosphere models rely on accurate land-surface parameters, such as the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR). It is known that FAPAR values retrieved from remote-sensing images suffer from scaling effects. Scaling transformation aims to derive accurate FAPAR values at a specific scale from values at other scales. In this letter, the scaling-effect mechanism and the scale-transformation algorithm are derived using a Taylor series expansion method based on the FAPAR model based on $P$ after simplification. The scaling algorithm was validated in the Heihe River Basin. The multiscale FAPAR values are inverted from 5-, 50-, and 100-m hyperspectral reflectance data. The scale-transformation formula was used, and the results agreed well with actual values.
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  • 4
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Recent work on hyperspectral image (HSI) unmixing has addressed the use of overcomplete dictionaries by employing sparse models. In essence, this approach exploits the fact that HSI pixels can be associated with a small number of constituent pure materials. However, unlike traditional least-squares-based methods, sparsity-based techniques do not require a preselection of endmembers and are thus able to simultaneously estimate the underlying active materials along with their respective abundances. In addition, this perspective has been extended so as to exploit the spatial homogeneity of abundance vectors. As a result, these techniques have been reported to provide improved estimation accuracy. In this letter, we present an alternative approach that is able to relax, yet exploit, the assumption of spatial homogeneity by introducing a model that captures both similarities and differences between neighboring abundances. In order to validate this approach, we analyze our model using simulated as well as real hyperspectral data acquired by the HyMap sensor.
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  • 5
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: A novel dual-graph-based matching method is proposed in this letter particularly for the multispectral/multidate images with low overlapping areas, similar patterns, or large transformations. First, scale invariant feature transform based matching is improved by normalizing gradient orientations and maximizing the scale ratio similarity of all corresponding points. Next, Delaunay graphs are generated for outlier removal, and the candidate outliers are selected by comparing the distinction of Delaunay graph structures. In order to bring back the inliers removed in Delaunay triangulation matching iterations and to exclude the remaining outliers, the recovery strategy equipped with the dual graph of Delaunay is explored. Inliers located in the corresponding Voronoi cells are recovered to the residual sets. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm for various representative remote sensing images.
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  • 6
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (GEO SAR) has the characteristic of long integration time; thus, the time-freezing model assumption of background ionosphere for traditional low Earth orbit (LEO) SAR no longer holds in GEO SAR. Furthermore, the background ionosphere variation within the integration time cannot be omitted either. In this letter, the variation of total electron content within integration time is analyzed and described in detail by using polynomial approximation, and a new GEO SAR signal model influenced by background ionosphere is also proposed. In view of this novel model, the analytical expression of image shift and defocusing phase error are derived in the first place. Then, a quantitative analysis for the image shift and image defocusing in the range and azimuth directions is conducted, and the performance bounds of time-varying parameters of background ionosphere effects on focusing are obtained. Finally, the U.S. Total Electron Content measured data are used to verify the theoretical results of background ionosphere effects on GEO SAR focusing.
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  • 7
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Emerging multisource earth observation technologies represented by wireless sensor network (WSN) technology are widely used in land surface observation and simulation studies. Consequently, data quality control of massive observation data has brought challenges to researchers. This letter describes a comprehensive approach applied to automatic data quality control of WSN data. First, summarize the quality element of WSN observation data which can be achieved through automated methods by analyzing the characteristics of WSN observation data, and develop a decision algorithm for each quality element. Then, associate the data type and algorithm through data quality control rules. Finally, establish an automatic data quality control system based on data quality control rules. As a matter of fact, this system has run for one and a half years and processed more than 500 million observation data records without human intervention. Application results show that this method system can effectively control the data quality of WSN data automatically.
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  • 8
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is scheduled to launch in 2017. This upcoming mission aims to provide data to determine the temporal and spatial changes of ice sheet elevation, sea ice freeboard, and vegetation canopy height. A photon-counting lidar onboard ICESat-2 yields point clouds resulting from surface returns and noise. In support of the ICESat-2 mission, this letter derives an adaptive density-based model that is capable of detecting the ground surface and vegetation canopy in photon-counting laser altimeter data. Based on results from point clouds generated by a first principle simulation and those observed by the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar, the ground and canopy returns can be reliably extracted using the proposed approach. Further study on performance assessment shows that smoother surfaces will result in improved accuracy of ground height estimation. In addition, the proposed detection approach has better performance in environments with lower noise, although the performance evaluation metric $F$ -measure does not vary significantly over a range of noise rates (0.5–5 MHz). This proposed approach is generally applicable for surface and canopy finding from photon-counting laser altimeter data.
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  • 9
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: This letter addresses the problem of unsupervised land-cover classification of remotely sensed multispectral satellite images from the perspective of cluster ensembles and self-learning. The cluster ensembles combine multiple data partitions generated by different clustering algorithms into a single robust solution. A cluster-ensemble-based method is proposed here for the initialization of the unsupervised iterative expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm which eventually produces a better approximation of the cluster parameters considering a certain statistical model is followed to fit the data. The method assumes that the number of land-cover classes is known. A novel method for generating a consistent labeling scheme for each clustering of the consensus is introduced for cluster ensembles. A maximum likelihood classifier is henceforth trained on the updated parameter set obtained from the EM step and is further used to classify the rest of the image pixels. The self-learning classifier, although trained without any external supervision, reduces the effect of data overlapping from different clusters which otherwise a single clustering algorithm fails to identify. The clustering performance of the proposed method on a medium resolution and a very high spatial resolution image have effectively outperformed the results of the individual clustering of the ensemble.
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  • 10
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: To improve the detection precision in complicated backgrounds, a novel rotation-invariant object detection method to detect objects in remote sensing images is proposed in this letter. First, a rotation-invariant feature called radial-gradient angle (RGA) is defined and used to find potential object pixels from the detected image blocks by combining with radial distance. Then, a principal direction voting process is proposed to gather the evidence of objects from potential object pixels. Since the RGA combined with the radial distance is discriminative and the voting process gathers the evidence of objects independently, the interference of the backgrounds is effectively reduced. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other existing well-known methods (such as the shape context-based method and rotation-invariant part-based model) and achieves higher detection precision for objects with different directions and shapes in complicated background. Moreover, the antinoise performance and parameter influence are also discussed.
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  • 11
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: A novel data acquisition and imaging method based on compressive sensing is utilized for impulse borehole radar (IBR). With the sparse transform that we present for IBR systems, only 50% or even less samples are needed to be collected and transmitted to reconstruct the target space, which reduces the sampling rate and data transmission rate of IBR systems. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed method is more robust in noise environment and the reconstructed target spaces have less artifacts compared with the solutions of the traditional Stolt migration method.
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  • 12
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: We present a Gaussian conditional random field model for the aggregation of aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals from multiple satellite instruments into a joint retrieval. The model provides aggregated retrievals with higher accuracy and coverage than any of the individual instruments while also providing an estimation of retrieval uncertainty. The proposed model finds an optimal temporally smoothed combination of individual retrievals that minimizes the root-mean-squared error of AOD retrieval. We evaluated the model on five years (2006–2010) of satellite data over North America from five instruments (Aqua and Terra MODIS, MISR, SeaWiFS, and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument), collocated with ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network ground-truth AOD readings, clearly showing that the aggregation of different sources leads to improvements in the accuracy and coverage of AOD retrievals.
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  • 13
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Basic compressed-sensing algorithms for image reconstructions mainly deal with the computation of sparse regularization. Remote sensing applications often have multisource or multitemporal images whose different components are acquired separately. Therefore, this letter considers the reconstruction of a remote sensing image using an auxiliary image from another sensor or another time as the reference. For this application, a new compressed-sensing object function is developed that uses a reference image as a prior. In the new model, the sparsity constraints in the transform domain come from the target image, and the gradient priors in the spatial domain come from the auxiliary reference image. The hybrid regularization is optimized by basing the algorithm on the Bregman split method. The proposed method shows better performances when compared with other three popular compressed-sensing algorithms.
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  • 14
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: An approach for calculating electromagnetic scattering, valid in the near- and far-field regions, from a homogeneous finite cylindrical vegetation sample at oblique incidence is presented and discussed. The proposed solution will help in taking into account multiple scattering effects due to plant structure. It does not require assumptions on the dimensions or electromagnetic properties of the vegetation cylinder.
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  • 15
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: This letter presents a feature weighting method for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. Appropriate feature weighting is essential for obtaining accurate classifications but so far has remained an open research problem. We propose in this letter a supervised three-component feature weighting method based on the Fisher linear discriminant. Fisher linear discriminant method is used to calculate a coefficient for each feature. Then, these coefficients are modified according to a three-component scattering power decomposition model, combining both physical and statistical scattering characteristics to adapt them for the particular scattering mechanisms inherent in PolSAR data and assigned to the coherency matrix to enhance the discriminating ability of the features. Freeman decomposition and Wishart classifier are used to classify the PolSAR image. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments NASA/JPL AIRSAR L-band and CSA Radarsat-2 C-band PolSAR images of the San Francisco area.
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  • 16
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: This study aims to understand the effects of spatial resolution on the surface backscattering characteristics of polarimetric radar. Surface scattering models based on approximate methods are formulated by the roughness second-order statistics to obtain a closed-form expression for the radar scattering response. Most studies have been carried out based on the roughness parameters of the infinite surface. In this letter, we propose the roughness autocorrelation function of truncated surfaces for a more realistic description of the roughness parameters of high-resolution radar. The use of roughness parameters for a truncated surface in the scattering model is pertinent to explain the dependence of the backscattering coefficient on the spatial resolution. Simulation results indicate that the traditional computation of the surface backscattering based on the autocovariance function of an infinite surface leads to an underestimation of the backscattering signature of the high-resolution radar.
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  • 17
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-11-05
    Description: Boreal forests play an important part in the climate system, and estimates of the biomass are important also from an economic point of view. In this letter, forest aboveground biomass is estimated from bistatic TanDEM-X data, a Lidar digital elevation model (DEM), and the interferometric water cloud model, without using training samples to calibrate the model. The forest was characterized by allometric relations for area fill (vegetation fraction) and height versus stem volume, and stem volume versus biomass. Biomass was estimated for 202 forest stands at least 1 ha large at the forest test site of Remningstorp, Sweden, from 18 bistatic TanDEM-X acquisitions with a relative root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 16%–32%. TanDEM-X acquisitions with a height of ambiguity around 80 m resulted in the best results. A multitemporal combination resulted in a relative RMSE of 17%. This result is comparable with the retrieval error obtained in a previous study when training the model using a set of known forest stands.
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  • 18
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: The dual-wavelength Echidna lidar is a portable ground-based full-waveform terrestrial scanning lidar for characterization of fine-scale forest structure and biomass content. While scanning, the instrument records the full time series of returns at a half-nanosecond rate from two coaligned 5-ns pulsed lasers at 1064 and 1548 nm wavelengths. Leaves absorb more strongly at 1548 nm compared to stems, allowing discrimination of forest composition at milliradian scales from the ground to the forest canopy. This work describes the instrument design and data products and demonstrates the power of two wavelength lidar to clearly distinguish leaves from woody material with preliminary field data from the Sierra Nevada National Forest.
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  • 19
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: In many real-world problems, data always lie in a low-dimensional manifold. Exploiting the manifold can greatly enhance the discrimination between different categories. In this letter, we propose a classification framework based on sparse representation to directly exploit the underlying manifold. Specifically, using the tangent plane to approximate the local manifold of each test sample, the proposed method classifies the sample by sparse representation in tangent space. Unlike several existing sparse-representation-based classification methods, which sparsely represent the test sample itself, the proposed method sparsely represents the local manifold of the test sample by tangent plane approximation. Therefore, it goes beyond the sample itself and is more robust to kinds of variations confronted in hyperspectral image (HSI) such as illustration differences and spectrum mixing. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for the classification of HSI with limited training samples.
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  • 20
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: This letter first analyzes the scattering features of civilian aircraft (CA) using high-resolution TerraSAR-X images of the Hong Kong International Airport based on the electromagnetic scattering theory. The main stable scattering features are found to be salient points. Then, a salient point vector (SPV) is proposed to describe the salient points. By adding two relaxation variables to the matching process, the SPV becomes both translationally and rotationally invariant over a certain orientation range. In addition, a recognition scheme is designed to validate the scattering analysis and the SPV descriptor. Finally, 43 test chips are collected from another TerraSAR-X image acquired in November 2013 in the same location with similar imaging parameters. The test chips are applied to validate the analysis, the SPV descriptor, and the recognition scheme. The results of the experiment indicate that the recognition rate of the Boeing 747 CA reaches 80% and that the scattering features of the aircraft are rotationally invariant to within at least 5 $^{circ}$ . This research verifies the potential application of CA monitoring using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar images.
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  • 21
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: Interferometric phase filtering is an indispensable step to obtain accurate measurement of digital elevation model and surface displacement. In the case of low-correlation or complicated topography, traditional phase filtering methods fail in balancing noise elimination and phase preservation, which leads to inaccurate interferometric phase. A new nonlocal interferometric phase filtering method taking advantage of higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) is proposed in this letter. For each pixel of the interferometric phase, a 3-D data array is established, and shrinkage is applied after HOSVD. A Wiener filter is used to improve the denoising performance in the end. Simulated and real data are employed to validate that the proposed method outperforms other traditional methods and some of the state-of-the-art nonlocal methods.
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  • 22
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: This letter proposes a new ship target detection method for very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on multilayer constant false alarm rate (CFAR). First, combined with log-normal distribution, a multilayer CFAR method is designed to overcome the holes and the fracture in the traditional detected results. This method can retain more details of ships and takes much less time than the traditional CFAR method for VHR SAR images. Second, based on a priori knowledge of ships, we use the sliding window to remove the false alarm targets. Finally, In order to measure the size and shape of a ship, we extract the outline of a ship and fill it by a level set method. Experimental results, carried out on real SAR images, demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the previous one in terms of the detection ratio of pixels instead of the number of ships.
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  • 23
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: Snow changes its morphology permanently from the moment a snow flake touches the ground. Under the influence of meteorological factors such as temperature, humidity, and wind, snow grains form complex structures of ice bonds enclosing variable portions of air. The characteristics of such structures are important for the formation of snow avalanches. Certain snow types such as surface hoar, ice crusts, or windblown snow play a major role in the formation of weak layers and slabs, which are precondition for dangerous slab avalanches. The reflection properties of snow depend on the optical equivalent grain size of the ice particles that constitute the snow cover. High spatial resolution remote sensing instruments with near-infrared (0.7–1.4 $muhbox{m}$ ) bands are able to detect such differences in the optical reflection of snow. We use normalized difference index band ratios from a spaceborne and an airborne remote sensing instrument to distinguish and map different snow-surface types in the neighborhood of Davos, Switzerland, enabling a valuable visualization of the spatial variability of the snow surface.
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  • 24
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: Hyperspectral imaging has gained significant interest in the past few decades, particularly in remote sensing applications. The considerably high spatial and spectral resolution of modern remotely sensed data often provides more accurate information about the scene. However, the complexity and dimensionality of such data, as well as potentially unwanted details embedded in the images, may act as a degrading factor in some applications such as classification. One solution to this issue is to utilize the spatial–spectral features to extract segments before the classification step. This preprocessing often leads to better classification results and a considerable decrease in computational time. In this letter, we propose a Pixon-based image segmentation method, which benefits from a preprocessing step based on partial differential equation to extract more homogenous segments. Moreover, a fast algorithm has been presented to adaptively tune the required parameters used in our Pixon-based schema. The acquired segments are then fed into the support vector machine classifier, and the final thematic class maps are produced. Experimental results on multi/hyperspectral data are encouraging to apply the proposed Pixons for classification.
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  • 25
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: High range resolution incoherent scatter spectra are routinely measured by means of alternating codes and random codes. These radar transmission modulations are cycles of phase-coded pulses whose lagged products form complementary code sets, enabling decoding of incoherent scatter lag profiles by means of matched filtering. Numerically optimized near-perfect modulations are potential successors of the alternating codes and random codes because they enable new measurement techniques, such as so-called multipurpose experiments. The near-perfect modulations cannot be decoded by means of matched filtering, but they are designed for analysis by means of lag profile inversion. Two improvements to this combination are introduced in this letter: Suppression of background noise correlations is implemented as part of lag profile inversion, removing the need for dedicated background measurements, and the concept of strong phase codes is adopted to near-perfect modulations, allowing one to neglect the receiver impulse response in lag profile inversion.
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  • 26
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-12-06
    Description: A brightness temperature ( $hbox{Tb}$ ) downscaling algorithm based on the synergy between active and passive microwave observations is tested using airborne data that simulate the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration scheduled for launch in January 2015. While this algorithm has been adopted as the baseline for SMAP, it has only been tested on a limited variety of land uses and vegetation types. Consequently, this study evaluates the SMAP active/passive downscaling algorithm using data with varied conditions. The SMAP experiment conducted in Australia has been used for this purpose. The algorithm was applied over several 9 km $times$ 9 km pixels with different land covers, so as to evaluate the accuracy of this algorithm under different heterogeneity levels. Brightness temperatures were downscaled from 9 to 3 km (approximating the resolution ratio of SMAP downscaling approach) across nine days of data. Results show that the root-mean-square error of $hbox{Tb}$ in grassland could meet the 2.4-K target accuracy of SMAP, while in cropping, it was 2 K higher than the target. The influence from water bodies was also assessed and confirmed to have a significant impact if not removed prior to downscaling.
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  • 27
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Conditional random field (CRF) has been widely used in optical image and remote sensing image segmentation because of the advantage of directly modeling the posterior distribution and capturing arbitrary dependencies among observations. However, for nonstationary SAR images, applications of CRF often fail because of their nonstationary property. The triplet Markov field (TMF) model is well appropriate for nonstationary SAR image processing, owing to the introduction of an auxiliary field which reflects the nonstationarity. Therefore, we introduce an auxiliary field to describe the nonstationarity of the posterior distribution and propose an unsupervised SAR image segmentation algorithm based on a conditional TMF (CTMF) framework which combines the advantages of both CRF and TMF. The proposed CTMF framework explicitly takes into account the nonstationary property of SAR images, directly models the posterior distribution, and considers the interactions among the observed data. Experimental results on real SAR images validate the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this letter.
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  • 28
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Topographic mapping is one of the main applications of airborne LiDAR. Waveform digitization and processing allow for both improved accuracy and higher ground detection rate compared with discrete return systems. Nevertheless, the quality of the ground peak estimation, based on last return extraction, strongly depends on the algorithm used. Best performing methods are too computationally intensive to be used on large data sets. We used Bayesian inference to develop a new ground extraction method whose most original feature is predictive uncertainty computation. It is also fast and robust to ringing and peak overlaps. Obtaining consistent ranging uncertainties is essential for determining the spatial distribution of error on the final product, point cloud, or digital elevation model. The robustness is achieved by a partial deconvolution followed by a Bayesian Gaussian function regression on optimally truncated data, which helps reduce the impact of overlapping peaks from low vegetation. Results from real data are presented, and the gain with respect to classical Gaussian peak fitting is assessed and illustrated.
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  • 29
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: We present a new model for nonlinear spectral mixing observed in hyperspectral imagery and demonstrate how this model can be used for unmixing and obtaining abundance maps. The model is based on the idea that a single pixel can contain several spatially segregated areas containing different mineral mixtures and fuses Hapke's radiative transfer model for intimate mineral mixtures with the traditional linear mixing model. The resulting model allows great flexibility for generating spectra, provides abundance coefficients in terms of total relative ground cover for each endmember, and can be reduced to several other nonlinear mixing models by an appropriate choice of the parameters. Experiments on laboratory mineral mixtures and real hyperspectral imagery show reduced reconstruction errors and more accurate abundance coefficients compared with the linear mixing model or the recently introduced multimixture pixel model. Moreover, the reconstruction error improvement can be used as a per-pixel measure of the size of the intimate mixing component.
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  • 30
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Weak-target detection and imaging are the challenging problems of airborne or spaceborne early warning radar. The envelope of a high-speed weak target after range compression spreads over range during the long observation period. To finely refocus a high-speed weak maneuvering target, motion parameters should be accurately obtained for compensating the envelope. This letter proposes a new imaging approach for high-speed maneuvering targets without a priori knowledge of their motion parameters. In this method, the azimuth compression function is constructed in a range and azimuth 2-D frequency domain, which can eliminate the coupling effect between range and azimuth. Theoretical analysis confirms that the methodology can precisely focus targets. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the performance for detecting and imaging high-speed maneuvering targets.
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  • 31
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The use of spherical statistics for comparing and analyzing different digital elevation models (DEMs) is proposed in this letter by the new software package VecStatGraphs3D. Spherical data deal with angular data such as unit vector in 3-D space and are used in disciplines such as meteorology, geomatics, biology, and geology. Usually, the most common descriptor to analyze DEMs is the root-mean-square error (linear statistic), but this statistic itself cannot describe the error positional distributions. Comparing homologous points in two different DEMs generates 3-D vectors, which can be analyzed by means of spherical statistics. A 3-D vector is defined by its module (linear statistics) and colatitude and longitude (spherical statistics). While several graphical and statistical tools are available for the analysis of directional data in 3-D, these tools consider only the angular magnitude and work with unit vectors. In this letter, the open-source software package VecStatGraphs3D is described. It works in the R environment and provides statistics for modules (linear), colatitude and longitude (spherical), and graphics for the joint analysis of 3-D vectors. The spatial locations of singular points between two DEMs of different spatial resolution: LIDAR (5 m) and ASTER Global Digital Elevation Map (30 m) are compared as examples using VecStatGraphs3D. The interactive 3-D graphics reveal spatial patterns and assist in understanding the effect of the DEM resolution on the uncertainty of the spatial locations of relief.
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  • 32
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: It is well known that the linear mixture model (LMM) is attracting much attention due to its simplicity. However, some theoretical analysis reveals that the traditional LMM also impedes the improvement of blind spectral unmixing. For this reason, we propose a novel blind spectral unmixing method (NBSUM) in this letter. NBSUM utilizes the conjugate gradient to calculate end-member spectral and abundance, which can not only overcome some shortcomings of the traditional LMM but also provide more accurate results. NBSUM is compared with some state-of-the-art approaches on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data sets, and the experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
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  • 33
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In recent years, multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar has been receiving increasing attention from researchers due to its numerous benefits. In contrast to conventional radar systems, it offers increased spatial resolution and improved parameter estimation, target tracking, and recognition performance. Recently, a combination of phased-array radar and MIMO radar, which is called Phased–MIMO radar, has also been proposed and studied. The ambiguity function has been a traditional and effective tool to investigate the range and Doppler resolution of conventional radar systems and is now being extended for MIMO radar systems. In this letter, the ambiguity function of the Phased–MIMO radar with overlapping subarrays has been formulated, and some mathematical properties of the ambiguity function have been derived. These properties can help when comparing the performance of conventional and MIMO radar systems. This letter can be considered an extension of the work done by Chen and Vaidyanathan for MIMO radar systems.
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  • 34
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: We focus on the choice of the investigation domains for a 2-D linear inversion algorithm based on the Born approximation. The application of an inversion algorithm to a wide B-scan requires the subdivision of the data into several observation domains and the partition of the buried scenario into different investigation domains, and this can be done in many ways, which raises the problem of examining the well advisedness of the adopted choice. In particular, here, we will propose the possibility of a double sequence of investigation domains. The results will also be compared with a migration algorithm.
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  • 35
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The triplet Markov field (TMF) can obtain more promising classification results of nonstationary images than the Markov random field (MRF). However, TMF has limitedly specialized applications to polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images with nonstationarity properties. In addition, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the auxiliary field derived by TMF. This implies that the auxiliary field may not have the physical meaning. We propose Wishart TMF with a specific auxiliary field for PolSAR image classification. We define a smoothness characteristic, which describes the extent of pixel smoothness in its neighborhood. This characteristic acts on the energy of the proposed TMF to supervise the classification of the auxiliary field. The auxiliary field can distinguish the smoothness stationarity and nonsmoothness stationarity of PolSAR images, which indicates that the auxiliary field has the specific physical meaning. The effectiveness of the proposed TMF is demonstrated by real PolSAR image classification experiments.
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  • 36
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In this letter, a novel method for inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging under a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) condition is presented. The method is a preprocess of the range profiles before motion compensation and is based on the pseudomatched filter, whose impulse response is obtained by conjugating and reversing the average of the coarsely aligned range profile envelopes. With the utilization of the presented method, the SNR of the target range profiles is improved, the conventional ISAR motion compensation methods perform much better, and the ISAR image result is much better focused under a low SNR condition. Experimental results based on both the simulated and real data of an aircraft validate the performance of the presented method.
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  • 37
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The electromagnetic scattering from 3-D perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) objects straddling the interface of a half-space is analyzed in this letter. The adaptive cross approximation (ACA) algorithm is adopted to enhance the computational efficiency. As the object is naturally separated into two parts by the interface of the half-space, two different mesh densities are required due to the contrast of the two background materials. Therefore, two multilevel tree structures are set up individually in the two regions. When the source and field points are in the same region, which corresponds to the primary terms and reflection terms, the implementation is similar to the free-space case. However, when considering the mutual coupling of the two regions, which corresponds to the transmitted terms, difficulties arise since the two trees are independent and the numbers of levels are, in general, different. In this case, a $z$ -dependent grouping strategy is proposed to redefine the well-separated interactions and match the abrupt changes at the interface. Three clustering strategies are proposed and discussed carefully to account for the mutual coupling in the two different regions of the half-space. The combined field integral equation (CFIE) formulation is further applied to improve the convergence of the system. Several numerical examples are demonstrated to validate the proposed schemes.
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  • 38
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Pixelwise classification, where each pixel is assigned to a predefined class, is one of the most important procedures in hyperspectral image (HSI) analysis. By representing a test pixel as a linear combination of a small subset of labeled pixels, a sparse representation classifier (SRC) gives rather plausible results compared with that of traditional classifiers such as the support vector machine. Recently, by incorporating additional structured sparsity priors, the second-generation SRCs have appeared in the literature and are reported to further improve the performance of HSI. These priors are based on exploiting the spatial dependences between the neighboring pixels, the inherent structure of the dictionary, or both. In this letter, we review and compare several structured priors for sparse-representation-based HSI classification. We also propose a new structured prior called the low-rank (LR) group prior, which can be considered as a modification of the LR prior. Furthermore, we will investigate how different structured priors improve the result for the HSI classification.
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  • 39
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission aims at estimating, over the oceans, sea surface salinity (SSS) with spatial and temporal coverage adequate for large-scale oceanography. Spatiotemporal averaging of the retrieved SSS [level-3 (L3) product] has to be properly performed in order to meet the challenging mission requirements. At high latitudes, the generally low sea surface temperature (SST) characterizing the ocean degrades the brightness temperature sensitivity to SSS, but conversely, an improvement in the L3 retrieved SSS performances should be expected due to an increased pixel sampling. This tradeoff between geophysical effects in cold seawater and the concomitant temporal oversampling has been addressed by analyzing the latitudinal trend of the retrieved salinity performances, in various retrieval configurations and settings, once a conservative and optimal data filtering strategy is applied. Quantitative rate of changes of the SSS retrieval performance with the SST variability is provided, together with the net oversampling contribution to the L3 SSS accuracy. The experiments carried out demonstrate that the high-latitude oversampling does not compensate for the SST-driven latitudinal degradation of the L3 SSS product quality.
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  • 40
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: A 2-D spectrum for bistatic synthetic aperture radar is derived in this letter. The derivation is based on the commonly used mathematic principles such as the method of stationary phase and the Fourier transform and the Lagrange inversion theorem in order to find the point of stationary phase in the method of stationary phase. Using the Lagrange inversion theorem allows minimizing the initial assumptions or the initial approximations. The derived 2-D spectrum is compared with the commonly used 2-D spectrum to verify it and illustrate its accuracy.
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  • 41
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In this letter, a novel long-time coherent integration method, known as the Radon-linear canonical transform (RLCT), is proposed for detection of a low observable moving target in sea clutter. The micro-Doppler (m-D) of a sea-surface target is studied and modeled as multiple linear-frequency-modulated signals, which result from the accelerated and 3-D rotated movements. The RLCT-based algorithm employs m-D as a useful signature for target detection and can simultaneously compensate the range and Doppler migrations during long observation time, which simplifies the operational procedure. By searching along the moving trajectory and using extra three degrees of freedom, the observation values of m-D signals can be well matched and accumulated as peaks in the RLCT domain. Then, the target can be declared by comparing the peak value with an adaptive threshold. The definition of the RLCT demonstrates that it is the generalization of the popular moving target detection, Radon-Fourier transform, fractional Fourier transform, and linear canonical transform methods. Finally, experiments using a real sea clutter data set show that the proposed method can achieve high integration gain and detection probability of a micromotion target in heavy sea clutter.
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  • 42
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: This letter describes an efficient approach of multidimensional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging for urban mapping. The proposed approach is an integration of tomographic SAR inversion and the well-known persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI). It consists of three steps: first, a global estimation of the topography and motion parameters using efficient algorithms such as PSI; second, a single and double scatterer discrimination step based on the results of the first step; finally, a tomographic SAR inversion, which is performed on the preclassified double scatterers, using the prior knowledge obtained in the first step, retrieving the topography and motion parameters of both scatterers. The proposed approach has been tested on a dozen of TerraSAR-X high-resolution spotlight image stacks. In this letter, examples from Las Vegas and Berlin are presented. The results are comparable with the one obtained by the most computationally expensive tomographic SAR algorithms (e.g., SL1MMER) only and saves computational time by a factor of 50.
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  • 43
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In this letter, a new high-frequency (HF) skywave multistatic radar that is used for ionospheric sensing and aircraft detection is presented. With multiple receiving sites, this radar can detect the aircraft in much larger surveillance with high probability and can obtain the characteristics of many ionospheric paths simultaneously. In addition, this radar adopts a binary-phase-coded continuous waveform to achieve a high Doppler resolution, a large signal processing gain, and a low probability of interception. Details of the system configuration, the ambiguity function of the sounding waveform, and the signal processing algorithm are described. The experimental results show that backscatter ionograms and oblique ionograms can be simultaneously obtained and that the aircraft with different flying conditions can be clearly detected with an HF skywave multistatic experimental radar.
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  • 44
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: This letter deals with the design, realization, and validation of a multimode/multifrequency airborne radar designed for both surface and subsurface prospections. The system operates in the frequency band from very high frequency (VHF) to ultrahigh frequency (UHF) and works in two different modes: 1) a nadir-looking sounder in the VHF band (carrier frequency of 163 MHz); and 2) a side-looking imager (i.e., synthetic aperture radar) in the UHF band with two channels at 450 and 860 MHz, respectively. The system validation has been carried out for the “sounder” mode due to helicopter-borne surveys carried out over an area in the Campania region, Southern Italy. The surveys have provided a first proof of system capability in obtaining useful information about the surface and shallower subsurface layers over a large scale and in a relatively short time. In particular, the data collected by the sounder have been processed by means of a microwave tomographic reconstruction approach, and features consistent with tunnels buried at a depth of 15 m have been identified.
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  • 45
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: A novel analytical approach for the 1-D microwave imaging of the stratified dispersive media is presented. The proposed approach provides the depth-dependent permittivity profile of the target area in terms of the spectral-domain reflection coefficients, which are measured at the surface of the interrogating medium over a band of frequencies depending upon the available antennas and other measuring equipment. The inverse solution of the depth-dependent permittivity profile is obtained with the help of a newly derived integral transform, which is the amended form of the conventional Fourier transform valid under situations where the spectral-domain reflection data are present only over a band of frequencies. The derived inverse solution is also made applicable for the dispersive media, such as the rectangular waveguides, by facilitating the separation of spectral and spatial variables in an innovative way. The applicability of the proposed approach is validated by reconstructing the depth-dependent permittivity profiles of a number of multilayered and stratified media using both the simulated and the measured reflection coefficient data with the help of the developed algorithm.
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  • 46
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of targets with complex motions such as fluctuating ships with oceanic waves and high maneuvering airplanes, the azimuth echo signals can be modeled as cubic phase signals (CPSs). In this letter, a new ISAR imaging algorithm based on the keystone time-chirp rate distribution (KTCRD) is proposed for the targets with complex motions. Compared with the recently published algorithms for the CPSs, the KTCRD can estimate the parameters of multicomponent CPSs without searching procedures and can acquire high antinoise performance with a relatively low computational load. With the estimated motion parameters, high-quality ISAR images can be obtained. Several simulation examples on the synthetic model are shown to validate the effectiveness of the new algorithm presented in this letter.
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  • 47
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: In this letter, we research a spatiotemporal-domain-based time–frequency peak filtering (TFPF) method in order to remove the large error (bias) of the conventional TFPF in intermediate-frequency seismic record discrimination. An intermediate-frequency seismic signal is one whose dominant frequency is about 40 Hz or higher. To find a balance between noise attenuation and reflected signal preservation, the radial-trace TPFT (RT-TFPF) takes both the unbiased condition and the adjacent seismic traces' correlation into consideration, and uses the RT transform to obtain a reduced-frequency input to decrease the TFPF error. Therefore, this method can discriminate some reflection events weakened by the conventional TFPF algorithm. First, we decrease the intermediate frequencies along RTs nearly aligned with the reflection event. Then, we obtain a less biased TFPF estimation with suitable window length $tau$ . Finally, we recover the original intermediate frequency with the inverse RT transform. With the RT-TFPF, we can enhance reflection events without sacrificing frequency components while attenuating as much random noise as possible. Experiments on both synthetic model and field data demonstrate that the RT-TFPF performs well both in random noise attenuation and intermediate-frequency preservation, in addition to presenting advantages over the conventional TFPF.
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  • 48
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The most effective way of determining the rate of elevation change of the Earth's large ice sheets using radar altimeters is to examine the difference in the elevation measured on ascending and descending orbits. This crossover difference has a static and time-varying component, and by isolating the time-varying part, one can construct a time series of the ice sheet elevation change. The static component of the crossover difference arises as a result of an anisotropic dependence of the extinction coefficient on the angle between the radar polarization and wind-induced features of the firn. Here, the static crossover difference observed by CryoSat-2 over the Antarctic ice sheet is examined, and a simple model is developed to explain the observed pattern. There is an excellent agreement between the modeled results and the observations, calling into question the results of previous studies of the same phenomenon with different radar altimeters.
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  • 49
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Nonlocal means (NLM) algorithm has been proven to be an effective context-sensitive denoising approach, where many similar patches spatially far from a given patch could provide nonlocal constraint to the local structure. For hyperspectral image, however, the conventional NLM algorithm becomes inapplicable for the high number of spectral bands. In this letter, we incorporate the image nonlocal self-similarity into the maximum a posteriori estimation for hyperspectral classification. The main novelty lies in the following two aspects: 1) The NLM algorithm is exploited to combine similar local structures and nonlocal averaging; 2) a new class-relativity measurement is proposed to describe the self-similarity in the context of the hyperspectral classification. Several experiments on simulated and real hyperspectral data sets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
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  • 50
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Bathymetry is usually determined using the positions of the water surface and the water bottom peaks of the green LiDAR waveform. The water bottom peak characteristics are known to be sensitive to the bottom slope, which induces pulse stretching. However, the effects of a more complex bottom geometry within the footprint below semitransparent media are less understood. In this letter, the effects of the water bottom geometry on the shifting of the bottom peaks in the waveforms were modeled. For the sake of simplicity, the bottom geometry is modeled as a $1D$ sequence of successive contiguous segments with various slopes. The positions of the peaks in waveforms were deduced using a conventional peak detection process on simulated waveforms. The waveforms were simulated using the existing Wa-LID waveform simulator, which was extended in this study to account for a $1D$ complex bottom geometry. An experimental design using various water depths, bottom slopes, and LiDAR footprint sizes according to the design of satellite sensors was used for the waveform simulation. Power laws that explained the peak time shifting as a function of the footprint size and the water bottom slope were approximated. Peak shifting induces a bias in the bathymetry estimates that is based on a peak detection of up to 92% of the true water depth. This bias may also explain the frequent underestimation of the water depth from bathymetric airborne LiDAR surveys observed in various empirical studies.
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  • 51
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Superresolution mapping (SRM) based on the Hopfield neural network (HNN) is a technique that produces land cover maps with a finer spatial resolution than the input land cover fraction images. In HNN-based SRM, it is assumed that the spatial dependence of land cover classes is homogeneous. HNN-based SRM uses an isotropic spatial dependence model and gives equal weights to neighboring subpixels in the neighborhood system. However, the spatial dependence directions of different land cover classes are discarded. In this letter, a revised HNN-based SRM with anisotropic spatial dependence model (HNNA) is proposed. The Sobel operator is applied to detect the gradient magnitude and direction of each fraction image at each coarse-resolution pixel. The gradient direction is used to determine the direction of subpixel spatial dependence. The gradient magnitude is used to determine the weights of neighboring subpixels in the neighborhood system. The HNNA was examined on synthetic images with artificial shapes, a synthetic IKONOS image, and a real Landsat multispectral image. Results showed that the HNNA can generate more accurate superresolution maps than a traditional HNN model.
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  • 52
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) based on ground weather radar could be considerably affected by the broadening, ascent, and blockage of the radar beam. These problems are particularly prevalent in mountainous regions. The current study proposes a multi-sensor approach to improve the ground-radar QPE in complex terrain. The proposed method, namely the Vertical Profile of Reflectivity (VPR) Identification and Enhancement (VPR-IE), integrates NOAA's National Mosaic QPE (NMQ) system and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar (PR) measurements. This study demonstrates promising performance of VPR-IE in the Mountainous West Region of the U.S. The potential error sources of this approach and its real-time implementation over the Continental United States are addressed as well.
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  • 53
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-14
    Description: The presence of multiplicative noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images makes segmentation and classification difficult to handle. Although a fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm and its variants (e.g., the FCM_S, the fast generalized FCM, the fuzzy local information C-means, etc.) can achieve satisfactory segmentation results and are robust to Gaussian noise, uniform noise, and salt and pepper noise, they are not adaptable to SAR image speckle. This letter presents a kernel FCM algorithm with pixel intensity and location information for SAR image segmentation. We incorporate a weighted fuzzy factor into the objective function, which considers the spatial and intensity distances of all neighboring pixels simultaneously. In addition, the energy measures of SAR image wavelet decomposition are used to represent the texture information, and a kernel metric is adopted to measure the feature similarity. The weighted fuzzy factor and the kernel distance measure are both robust to speckle. Experimental results on synthetic and real SAR images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective for SAR image segmentation.
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  • 54
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: The objective of this paper is to extract a suitable number of evenly distributed matched points, given the characteristics of the site and the sensors involved. The intent is to increase the accuracy of automatic image-to-image registration for high-resolution multisensor data. The initial set of matching points is extracted using a scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)-based method, which is further used to evaluate the initial geometric relationship between the features of the reference and sensed images. The precise matching points are extracted considering location differences and local properties of features. The values of the parameters used in the precise matching are optimized using an objective function that considers both the distribution of the matching points and the reliability of the transformation model. In case studies, the proposed algorithm extracts an appropriate number of well-distributed matching points and achieves a higher correct-match rate than the SIFT method. The registration results for all sensors are acceptably accurate, with a root-mean-square error of less than 1.5 m.
    Print ISSN: 0196-2892
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  • 55
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: This paper presents a novel semisupervised kernel partial least squares (KPLS) algorithm for nonlinear feature extraction to tackle both land-cover classification and biophysical parameter retrieval problems. The proposed method finds projections of the original input data that align with the target variable (labels) and incorporates the wealth of unlabeled information to deal with low-sized or underrepresented data sets. The method relies on combining two kernel functions: the standard radial-basis-function kernel based on labeled information and a generative, i.e., probabilistic, kernel directly learned by clustering the data many times and at different scales across the data manifold. The construction of the kernel is very simple and intuitive: Two samples should belong to the same class if they consistently belong to the same clusters at different scales. The effectiveness of the proposed method is successfully illustrated in multi- and hyperspectral remote sensing image classification and biophysical parameter estimation problems. Accuracy improvements in the range between $+$ 5% and 15% over standard principal component analysis (PCA), $+$ 4% and 15% over kernel PCA, and $+$ 3% and 10% over KPLS are obtained on several images. The average gain in the root-mean-square error of $+$ 5% and reductions in bias estimates of $+$ 3% are obtained for biophysical parameter retrieval compared to standard PCA feature extraction.
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  • 56
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: This paper proposes a novel two-stage method for remote sensing image segmentation. First, initial small segments, also called subobject primitives (sub-OPs), are obtained using edge-constrained watershed segmentation and edge allocation. These segments are gradually merged into a larger segment until the edge-controlled limits are reached, thereby creating the initial OPs. In this stage, a concept of hard-boundary ratio is proposed to control the merge effectively. Second, nonconstrained merging is conducted on the OPs, which results in final segmentation. In addition, a repeatable pairwise segment-merging scheme is utilized. This scheme improves method efficiency and accuracy. Comprehensive experiments comparing this new method with the multiresolution segmentation method of eCognition were conducted. Results show that this new method has the following advantages: 1) higher segmentation accuracy and OP boundary precision and 2) less dependence on the scale parameter.
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  • 57
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: A 3-D tree structure plays an important role in many scientific fields, including forestry and agriculture. For example, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can efficiently capture high-precision 3-D spatial arrangements and structure of trees as a point cloud. In the past, several methods to reconstruct 3-D trees from the TLS point cloud were proposed. However, in general, they fail to process incomplete TLS data. To address such incomplete TLS data sets, a new method that is based on a structure-aware global optimization approach (SAGO) is proposed. The SAGO first obtains the approximate tree skeleton from a distance minimum spanning tree (DMst) and then defines the stretching directions of the branches on the tree skeleton. Based on these stretching directions, the SAGO recovers missing data in the incomplete TLS point cloud. The DMst is applied again to obtain the refined tree skeleton from the optimized data, and the tree skeleton is smoothed by employing a Laplacian function. To reconstruct 3-D tree models, the radius of each branch section is estimated, and leaves are added to form the crown geometry. The developed methodology has been extensively evaluated by employing a dozen TLS point clouds of various types of trees. Both qualitative and quantitative performance evaluation results have indicated that the SAGO is capable of effectively reconstructing 3-D tree models from grossly incomplete TLS point clouds with significant amounts of missing data.
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  • 58
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    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: Differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (D-InSAR) is a powerful method for measuring surface deformation, such as in studies of the earthquake cycle, volcano deformation monitoring, land subsidence monitoring, and glaciological studies. However, its application to glaciological studies is limited by the lack of accurate digital elevation models (DEMs), particularly over the Antarctic ice sheet. Previous studies on ice motion using D-InSAR are mostly based on short-baseline interferograms because these data sets are insensitive to DEM errors. Unfortunately, short-baseline interferograms are often unavailable. In this paper, we refine the InSAR technique by using a combination of two interferograms to make accurate ice-flow velocity measurements. The refined technique is tested in the Grove Mountains area, East Antarctica. Ice-flow velocities from the baseline-combination method are in good agreement with those measured by short-baseline interferograms. This method is also capable of reducing phase errors by combining the appropriate data sets. The reliability of the data sets is assessed by defining a baseline-combination parameter and ensuring that it is less than or equal to 1.0. With this method, we are able to extend the usefulness of D-InSAR for glaciological studies.
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  • 59
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: This paper investigates the use of polarimetry to improve the estimation of the height of buildings in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Polarimetric coherence optimization techniques solve the problem of layover effects in urban scenes by allowing a phase separation of the scatterers sharing the same resolution cell. Bare soil elevation estimation is also improved by the polarimetric phase diversity. First, we present an analysis of the statistical modeling of the generalized coherence set. A building height estimation method is then derived from this analysis. Finally, the method is tested and quantitatively validated over an X-band polarimetric interferometric SAR (PolInSAR) airborne image acquired in a single-pass mode, containing a set of 140 different buildings with ground truth.
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  • 60
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: In this paper, we contribute to answer the question: How accurately can we estimate heights of buildings with flat roofs given one high-resolution single-pass interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) image pair and one aerial orthophoto? What makes this problem challenging are the different sensor geometries and the sound stochastic combination of all available elevation cues. We revisit already existing methods and develop novel approaches to determine building heights. A rigorous stochastic approach based on least squares adjustment with functionally dependent parameters is introduced to combine all height measurements per building to one robust height estimate. Observation accuracies of the stochastic model are either taken from the literature or estimated empirically. A major benefit of adjustment is that it delivers a posterior standard deviation per height, which can be interpreted as a precision indicator and is of high relevance for practical applications. Estimated heights of an urban scene are compared to ground truth acquired with airborne laser scanning, allowing us to assess height accuracies that can be achieved under nearly optimal conditions. We conduct statistical tests that validate our model and show that a weighted combination of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with least squares adjustment delivers reliable height estimates with meter accuracy for flat-roofed buildings. Additionally, we empirically estimate a confidence interval of the estimated heights that directly tells the user the security margin to be included, for example, in case of building evacuations for an anticipated flooding event, under the condition that the data and model have the same specifications as in this paper.
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  • 61
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: A compact polarimetric (CP) radar system requires fewer measurements than a fully polarimetric (FP) system, thus allowing added flexibility in radar system design. Previous studies have shown the potential of using compact polarimetry for radar remote sensing of soil moisture. This paper extends previous studies by considering a time series data cube retrieval algorithm and measurements in the presence of vegetation. Vegetation information is assumed to be provided by an ancillary data source in the retrieval process. The performance of an algorithm for reconstructing FP information from CP measurements of vegetated soil surfaces is also examined. The results of the study show that only a modest degradation in soil moisture retrieval performance occurs when compact-pol measurements are used in place of full-pol data.
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  • 62
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: A fluxgate magnetometer array for magnetic object localization is designed, where hard-iron and soft-iron magnetic distortion fields are the major factors influencing measurement accuracy. A vector compensation method is proposed to suppress error, in which magnetometer error, misalignment error, and magnetic distortion fields are considered. The experimental system mainly consists of a plane cross magnetometer array, a magnet (to be hard-iron), a steel block (to be soft-iron), and a deployment platform (to change the attitude of the magnetometer array). Experimental results show that integrated compensation parameters can be obtained accurately, and array difference errors are reduced about two orders, thus proving the effectiveness of the vector compensation method. The compensated array is used for static and dynamic localization in 3-D. In static situation, localization errors are reduced from 0.17 m, 0.28 m, and 0.27 m to 0.03 m, 0.05 m, and 0.14 m, respectively. On the object deployment trace, error intensity is reduced from 0.17 to 0.04 m. In particular, the dynamic localization results are unreliable without compensation, and the error intensity is reduced from 2.47 to 0.05 m using the proposed method, thus improving the localization accuracy.
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  • 63
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: A probabilistic neural-network-based feature-matching algorithm for a stereo image pair is presented in this paper, which will be useful as a constraint initializing method for further dense matching technique. In this approach, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) features are used to detect interest points in a stereo image pair. The descriptor which is associated with each keypoint is based on the histogram of the gradient magnitude and direction of gradients. These descriptors are the preliminary input for the matching algorithm. Using disparity range computed by visual inspection, the search area can be restricted for a given stereo image pair. Reduced search area improves the computation speed. Initial probabilities of matches are assigned to the keypoints which are considered as probable matches from the selected search area by Bayesian reasoning. The probabilities of all such matches are improved iteratively using relaxation labeling technique. Neighboring probable matches are exploited to improve the probability of best match using consistency measures. Confidence measures considering the neighborhood, unicity, and symmetry are some validation techniques which are built into the technique presented here for finding accurate matches. The algorithm is found to be effective in matching SIFT features detected in a stereo image pair with greater accuracy, and these accurate correspondences can be used in finding the fundamental matrix which encodes the epipolar geometry between the given stereo image pair. This fundamental matrix can then be used as a constraint for finding inliers that are used in matching methods for deriving dense disparity map.
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  • 64
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: With the flourish of the nonlocal mean method, the neighborwise similarity metric is widely applied in speckle reduction for its robust performance on the search of similar samples. In this metric, an isotropic kernel function is usually chosen to aggregate the corresponding pixels' distance between two neighborhoods. It means that the kernel function is considered as the explanation of the local spatial relationship at each pixel. However, for anisotropic features (such as edges and lines), a strong relationship exists along their directions rather than across them, so the isotropic kernel is not suitable to explain the spatial relationship around these features. Meanwhile, due to the inherent speckle in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the discrimination and exploration of the geometrical properties of anisotropic features are important for the construction of adaptive kernel function. In this paper, the sketch map which is a representation of the sketch information of SAR images is extracted as the criterion for designing the kernel function. Meanwhile, due to the properties of symmetric and maximal self-similarity, a modified ratio distance is proposed and used jointly with the constructed kernel function as a similarity metric. Then, under the local stationary assumption, the local maximal homogeneous region of each pixel is searched by using the region growing method with the proposed metric. Moreover, maximal likelihood rule is used within the region for the estimation of true value. From the experiments on the synthetic and real SAR images, a promising performance in terms of speckle reduction and preservation of the details is achieved by our proposed method.
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  • 65
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-05-03
    Description: This paper proposes a lossless to lossy compression scheme for hyperspectral images based on dual-tree Binary Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (BEZW) algorithm. The algorithm adapts Karhunen–Loève Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform to achieve 3-D integer reversible hybrid transform and decorrelate spectral and spatial data. Since statistics of the hyperspectral image are not symmetrical, the asymmetrical dual-tree structure is introduced. The 3-D BEZW algorithm compresses hyperspectral images by implementing progressive bitplane coding. The lossless and lossy compression performance is compared with other state-of-the-art predictive coding and transform-based coding algorithms on Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer images. Results show that the 3-D-BEZW lossless compression performance is comparable with the best predictive algorithms, while its computational cost is comparable with those of transform-based algorithms.
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  • 66
    Publication Date: 2014-05-07
    Description: In this paper, we propose a joint collaborative representation (CR) classification method with multitask learning for hyperspectral imagery. The proposed approach consists of the following aspects. First, several complementary features are extracted from the hyperspectral image. We next apply these features into the unified multitask-learning-based CR framework to acquire a representation vector and adaptive weight for each feature. Finally, the contextual neighborhood information of the image is incorporated into each feature to further improve the classification performance. The experimental results suggest that the proposed algorithm obtains a competitive performance and outperforms other state-of-the-art regression-based classifiers and the classical support vector machine classifier.
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  • 67
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-05-07
    Description: Data from wide field-of-view sensors have provided a wealth of information of the Earth's surface for many years. Of the more recent efforts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Observing System Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument has been operational since 2000 for Terra (mid-2002 for Aqua). The wide field of view and high temporal frequency of MODIS provide near daily global coverage. However, this coverage comes at the cost of some level of spatial accuracy due to known effects of pixel size growth at increasing view zenith angles (VZAs). Further complicating the matter of variable viewing geometry is the application of a fixed grid for the geolocation of MODIS observations. An accurate understanding of this process is necessary to characterize the effective spatial resolution of daily MODIS gridded products. In this paper, we estimate the point spread function (PSF) of nominal 250-m MODIS gridded surface reflectance products from sequences of daily images over man-made large-size targets. Our results suggest that, in near optimal locations, the resolution of those MODIS gridded products varies between 344 and 835 m along rows and between 292 and 523 m along columns when the VZA ranges from 0 $^{circ}$ (nadir view) to 55 $^{circ}$ , respectively. We also discuss some implications of the reliance on a global fixed grid, such as the MODIS sinusoidal grid, on the relation between location and spatial resolution.
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  • 68
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: This paper presents a nonlocal Lee (NL-Lee) filter for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar despeckling. In the proposed NL-Lee filter, a kind of hybrid patch similarity measure is constructed by combining together the structure similarity introduced by the nonlocal means (NLM) filter and the homogeneity similarity introduced by the Lee filter, which works in a distributive way. This combination leads to two important advantages for the proposed nonlocal filter. One is the improved robustness to the NLM parameters such as patch size and search neighborhood size, since the patch regularity assumption can be enhanced by the introduced hybrid patch similarity; the other one is the better performance tradeoff between speckle removal and detail preservation, because of the good balance between structure similarity and homogeneity similarity obtained by the framework of the proposed NL-Lee filter. Experimental results are given to demonstrate its competitive denoising performance.
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  • 69
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Sparsity-based unmixing algorithms, exploiting the sparseness property of the abundances, have recently been proposed with promising performances. However, these algorithms are developed for the linear mixture model (LMM), which cannot effectively handle the nonlinear effects. In this paper, we extend the current sparse regression methods for the LMM to bilinear mixture models (BMMs), where the BMMs introduce additional bilinear terms in the LMM in order to model second-order photon scattering effects. To solve the abundance estimation problem for the BMMs, we propose to perform a sparsity-based abundance estimation by using two dictionaries: a linear dictionary containing all the pure endmembers and a bilinear dictionary consisting of all the possible second-order endmember interaction components. Then, the abundance values can be estimated from the sparse codes associated with the linear dictionary. Moreover, to exploit the spatial data structure where the adjacent pixels are usually homogeneous and are often mixtures of the same materials, we first employ the joint-sparsity (row-sparsity) model to enforce structured sparsity on the abundance coefficients. However, the joint-sparsity model is often a strict assumption, which might cause some aliasing artifacts for the pixels that lie on the boundaries of different materials. To deal with this problem, the low-rank-representation model, which seeks the lowest rank representation of the data, is further introduced to better capture the spatial data structure. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms provide much enhanced performance compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.
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  • 70
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: In this paper, a global ionospheric data assimilation model is constructed based on the empirical international-reference-ionosphere model and the Kalman filter. A sparse matrix method is used to militate the huge computation and storage problems. A series of observing system simulation experiments has been performed based on the existing global ground-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) network, the planned Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate #2/Formosa Satellite Mission #7 (COSMIC-2/FORMOSAT-7) orbits, and the real global position system and GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) orbits. Specifically, the COSMIC-2 will have six 24 $^{circ}$ inclination satellites in 500-km altitude and six 72 $^{circ}$ inclination satellites in 800-km altitude. The slant total electron content of ground-based GNSS, radio occultation and ocean reflection (OR) of 12 low-Earth-orbit satellites, and cross-link between COSMIC-2 low and high inclination satellites are simulated by the NeQuick model. The ORs show great impacts in specifying the ionosphere except over the inland area. It complements the existing ground-based GNSS network, which mainly observes the ionosphere over the land area. The 24 $^{circ}$ and 72 $^{circ}$ satellites can complement each other to optimize the global ionospheric specification. The COSMIC-2 mission is expected to contribute significantly to the accurate ionospheric nowcast. Its potential ability in ionospheric short-term forecast is also discussed.
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  • 71
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: The reliability of any final differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (DInSAR) product is directly related to the phase quality of the interferograms involved in the processing. Performing an appropriate selection of high-quality pixels is hence mandatory in order to avoid the inclusion of noisy data in the processing and thus obtain reliable deformation information within the area of study. In this framework, a new full-resolution pixel selection method based on exploiting the spectral properties of pointlike scatterers is presented. The method is developed from the concept of the so-called coherent scatterers, which are characterized by having a correlated spectrum in a single acquisition, but now involving the temporal axis in the detection. Using the spectral properties of scatterers to perform the DInSAR pixel selection step presents some advantages with respect to the well-known permanent scatterer (PS) approach. On the one hand, the radiometric calibration of data is not required since the detection is now not dependent on the amplitude behavior of scatterers. On the other hand, a reliable pixel selection can be performed even with a reduced number of images due to the nature of the estimator. In contrast, its main limitation relies on the loss of range resolution involved in the sublook generation process. The method is more suited for urban scenarios where the density of temporally stable pointlike scatterers is generally higher. In this context, the final deformation maps obtained using the new method presented are compared, in terms of density and phase quality, with the ones obtained with the well-known traditional PS approach, showing a similar performance. Finally, since both methods characterize pointlike scatterers from different points of view, the combination of both techniques is proposed leading to a significant increase in the pixels' density and giving place to a meaningful improvement in the final DInSAR results.
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  • 72
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Reflectometry of signals of opportunity such as those emitted by a global navigation satellite system, known as GNSS-R, has been developed over the past years as a technique with great potential for ocean scatterometry, among other applications. Different approaches have been proposed to use GNSS-R for remote sensing of ocean surface roughness. One of them is based on deriving some descriptor/metric from the measured delay-Doppler map (DDM) and directly relating it to a geophysical property of the scattering surface. For instance, different descriptors have been proposed in the literature to measure the DDM spreading caused by the increase in ocean surface mean square slopes due to surface winds. In this paper, a new descriptor based on the DDM is proposed for wind direction retrieval. This descriptor, designated as the skewness angle $varphi_{1, {rm skew}}$ , measures the asymmetry in the DDM power distribution along the Doppler frequency axis, and it was modeled as a function of wind direction by means of a simulation study. Then, that model was validated using real GNSS-R data from an airborne experiment. After validation, the DDM skewness model was successfully used for wind direction retrieval, with a resulting rms error on the order of 20 $^{circ}$ .
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  • 73
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Techniques concerning postdisaster assessment from remotely sensed images have been studied by different research communities in the past decade. Such an assessment benefits a range of stakeholders, e.g., government organizations, insurance industry, local communities, and individual homeowners. This work explores detailed damage assessment on an individual building basis by utilizing supervised classification. In contrast with previous research efforts in the field, this work attempts at predicting the type of damages such as missing tiles, collapsed rooftop, and presence of holes, gaps, or cavities. Various existing and novel intensity-, edge-, and color-based features are evaluated. Additionally, preprocessing steps that automatically correct photometric and geometric differences are proposed. Furthermore, a study on the reliability of high-resolution aerial imagery in damage interpretation is conducted by comparing results with the assessment of expert volunteers. Results show that the proposed damage detection framework is very effective and performs at a level similar to that of the experts. This paper concludes that the type and extent of damage to individual rooftops can be identified with good accuracy from high-resolution aerial images. It is envisaged that the automated tools presented in this paper would play a significant role in rapid posthurricane damage estimation and in helping to better manage rescue and recovery missions.
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  • 74
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Simple functions of radar backscatter coefficients have been proposed as indices of soil moisture and vegetation, such as the radar vegetation index, i.e., RVI, and the soil saturation index, i.e., $m_{s}$ . These indices are ratios of noisy and potentially miscalibrated radar measurements and are therefore particularly susceptible to estimation errors. In this study, we consider uncertainty in satellite estimates of RVI and $m_{s}$ arising from two radar error sources: noise and miscalibration. We derive expressions for the variance and bias in estimates of RVI and $m_{s}$ due to noise. We also derive expressions for the sensitivity of RVI and $m_{s}$ to calibration errors. We use one year (September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012) of Aquarius scatterometer observations at three polarizations ( $sigma_{rm HH}$ , $sigma_{rm VV}$ , and $sigma_{rm HV}$ ) to map predicted error estimates globally, using parameters relevant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite mission. We find that RVI is particularly vulnerable to errors in the calibration offset term over lightly vegetated regions, resulting in overestimates of RVI in some arid regions. $m_{s}$ is most sensitive to calibration errors over regions where the dynamic range of the backscatter coefficient is small, including deserts and forests. Noise induces biases in both indices, but they are negligible in both cases; however, it also induces va- iance, which is large for highly vegetated regions (for RVI) and areas with low dynamic range in backscatter values (for $m_{s}$ ). We find that, with appropriate temporal and spatial averaging, noise errors in both indices can be reduced to acceptable levels. Areas sensitive to calibration errors will require masking.
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  • 75
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    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Multisatellite measurements of altimeter-derived sea surface height (SSH) and sea surface temperature (SST) provide a wealth of information about ocean circulation, particularly mesoscale ocean dynamics which may involve strong spatiotemporal relationships between SSH and SST fields. Within an observation-driven framework, we investigate the extent to which mesoscale ocean dynamics may be decomposed into a mixture of dynamical modes, characterized by different local regressions between SSH and SST fields. Formally, we develop a novel latent class regression model to identify dynamical modes from joint SSH and SST observation series. Applied to the highly dynamical Agulhas region, we demonstrate and discuss the geophysical relevance of the proposed mixture model to achieve a spatiotemporal segmentation of the upper ocean dynamics.
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  • 76
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Polar sea ice is an important input to global climate models and is considered to be a sensitive indicator of climate change. While originally designed only for wind estimation, radar backscatter measurements collected by wind scatterometers have proven useful for estimating the extent of sea ice. During the Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) mission, SeaWinds data were used to operationally map the sea ice extent. The resulting sea ice maps were used to mask near-surface winds to support SeaWinds' primary mission of measuring near-surface winds over the ocean. This paper describes the operational SeaWinds sea ice extent mapping algorithm, provides validation comparisons, and presents results from the ten-year data product. Starting with enhanced resolution horizontal polarization and vertical polarization backscatter images, the algorithm employs an iterative maximum-likelihood classifier with fixed thresholds to segment sea ice and open ocean pixels. Residual classification errors are reduced through binary image processing techniques and sea ice growth/retreat constraint methods. The algorithm results are compared with sea ice concentrations derived from Special Sensor Microwave/Imager data and with RADARSAT synthetic aperture radar imagery. The results suggest differences in the sensitivities of active and passive products given their channel sets and specific algorithms. Derived sea ice extents over the full decade-long QuikSCAT mission data set are analyzed to show important trends in sea ice extent for the Antarctic and Arctic regions.
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  • 77
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique, capable of providing high-resolution images independent of weather conditions and sunlight illumination. This makes SAR very attractive for the systematic observation of dynamic processes on the Earth's surface. However, conventional SAR systems are limited in that a wide swath can only be achieved at the expense of a degraded azimuth resolution. This limitation can be overcome by using systems with multiple receive apertures, displaced in along track, but a very long antenna is required to map a wide swath. If a relatively short antenna with a single aperture in along track is available, it is still possible to map a wide area: Multiple swaths can be, in fact, simultaneously imaged using digital beamforming in elevation, but “blind ranges” are present between adjacent swaths. This paper considers an innovative concept, staggered SAR, where the pulse repetition interval (PRI) is continuously varied. This concept allows the imaging of a wide continuous swath without the need for a long antenna with multiple apertures. The choice of the sequence of PRIs and the preprocessing of the raw data are discussed in detail, showing how the staggered SAR is even less affected by ambiguities of pointlike or extended targets with respect to a system with constant PRI, which simultaneously maps multiple swaths. Some system design examples are finally presented and compared.
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  • 78
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Declining stratospheric ozone concentrations have led to higher levels of ultraviolet (UV) B (UVB) radiation at the Earth's surface, particularly in Antarctic spring time. Increased exposure to UVB radiation can decrease the productivity of sea-ice algae, as well as cause damage to organisms living in the clear water beneath the Antarctic pack ice. Conversely, sea-ice algae and other photosynthetic organisms rely on photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) to drive and sustain growth. Field work performed during the 2007 Australian Antarctic Program Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem eXperiment voyage to the East Antarctic sea-ice zone allowed the estimation of diffuse attenuation coefficients for pack ice and the overlying snow at UV wavelengths (305, 313, 320, 340, 380, and 395 nm) and for PAR. The UV attenuation coefficients were 9.6–12.7 $hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ for snow and 1.57–2.05 $hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ for pack ice. The PAR attenuation coefficients were 10.5 $hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ (snow) and 1.52 $hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ (pack ice). The attenuation coefficients for erythemally weighted UVB radiation were 11.3 $ hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ (snow) and 1.82 $hbox{m}^{ - 1}$ (pack ice). The analysis also estimated the reflection coefficient (albedo) of snow as 0.67 for UV wavelengths and 0.68 for PAR, but the snow cover was not always optically thick.
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  • 79
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are often affected by speckle noise, which originates in the SAR system's coherent nature. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective algorithm to make the traditional Student's t-mixture model (SMM) more robust to noise. The proposed new modified SMM (MSMM) is applied for SAR image segmentation. SMM has come to be regarded as an alternative to the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as it is heavy tailed and more robust to outliers. However, a major shortcoming of this method is that it does not take into account the spatial dependencies in the image. Although some existing methods incorporate the spatial relationship between neighboring pixels, they are still not robust enough to noise. The advantages of our method are as follows. First, we introduce MSMM to incorporate the local spatial information and pixel intensity value by considering the conditional probability of an image pixel influenced by the probabilities of pixels in its immediate neighborhood. Furthermore, we introduce the additional parameter $alpha$ to control the extent of this influence. The larger $alpha$ indicates the heavier extent of influence in the neighborhoods. Second, the prior probability of an image pixel is influenced by the probabilities of pixels in its immediate neighborhood, which incorporates local spatial and component information. Third, our model is based on the finite mixture model (FMM); it is simple and easy to implement, and the expectation maximization algorithm can be applied for estimation of optimal parameters. Finally, the traditional SMM can be considered as a special case of our model. Thus, our method is general enough for FMM-based techniques. Experimental results on both simulated and real SAR images demonstrate the improved robustness and effectiveness of our approach.
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  • 80
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: Waveheight measurements with high-frequency radar have been troubled by the limitation dependent upon radio frequency for decades. It is suggested that high frequencies are needed for measuring low waves, whereas low frequencies are suitable for high waves. In this letter, a new waveheight inversion method using dual frequency is presented. Measurements of the two frequencies are fused together, according to their Doppler spectrum properties, to improve the range and accuracy of waveheight estimation. Experimental results collected on the coast of the Taiwan Strait over 18 days are shown to prove the validity of the method.
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  • 81
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: Time–frequency peak filtering (TFPF) has been widely applied to suppress the random noise in seismic data in recent years. Conventional TFPF adopts a pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution to ensure the approximate linearity of the signal. However, a short window length (WL) cannot effectively attenuate the random noise and a long WL can hardly recover the subtle structures of seismic events. In this letter, we discuss the different correlation integral values of signal and noise in the radial-trace domain for identifying the noise and signal segments. Then, a longer WL according to the noise intensity is used to remove the random noise and a shorter WL according to the frequency characteristics of the signal is used to preserve the details of the signal. The experiment results on both the synthetic model and the field seismic data show that this method can effectively remove noise from seismic record and maintain the amplitude of the valid signal.
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  • 82
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: This letter presents a novel hierarchical semisupervised support vector machine (SVM) for classification of hyperspectral images. The method exploits the wealth of unlabeled samples by means of their cluster features. The method learns a suitable framework for classifying cluster features by a semisupervised SVM and thus makes use of advantages of clustering and classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed classification method is effective for hyperspectral image classification when a few labeled samples are available. Another advantage of the proposed method is that the hierarchical structure can simultaneously take clustering and classification information into consideration.
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  • 83
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: The digital elevation model (DEM) is one of the most important sources used for Earth surface analysis because of its various applications and its usability in subsequent studies. A DEM can be generated with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) and radargrammetry techniques from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with orbital separation between them as the baseline. The on-board radar imaging system records both phase and intensity information of the backscattered signals. Radargrammetry is based on the disparity between two intensity images which is less affected by temporal and atmospheric decorrelation while InSAR uses the phase differences between two images. However, SAR intensity images may have low spatial resolution compared to optical images that are used in the photogrammetric DEM generation and the original SAR image is degraded by speckle noise. This leads to low accuracy of radargrammetric DEMs. It is necessary to develop methods focusing on original SAR images to improve the accuracy of radargrammetric DEM generation. In this letter, we propose that the single look complex (SLC) SAR image reprocessing method can be utilized to improve the image quality of radargrammetric DEMs. Simulated noise-free SAR images are used to generate radargrammetric DEMs for the purpose of comparison. Three SLC SAR images are selected for image quality improvement in each track. Other images in the same track are matched and processed to one reference image. The SAR simulation images are generated based on the reference image in each track. Therefore, the products in the same track have the same meta-information. Each DEM product is compared with conventional radargrammetric DEMs. This study shows that DEMs generated from re-processed SAR images are more accurate than radargrammetric DEMs from single-pair SAR images. Also, the accuracy of radargrammetric DEM produced with the proposed method is close to DEMs generated with noise-free simulated SAR images.
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  • 84
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) gross primary production (GPP) data (MOD17), based on the light-use-efficiency algorithm, have been widely used to assess large-scale carbon budgets. However, systemic errors of this product have been reported, particularly for nonforest ecosystems. Here, we test a simple and operational way to estimate GPP in nonforest ecosystems by inverting the MODIS evapotranspiration (ET) product (MOD16) using ecosystem water use efficiency $(hbox{WUE}! =! hbox{GPP/ET})$ . Field measurements from 17 nonforest AmeriFlux sites of GPP were used for validation. Results show that the inverted GPP from MOD16 (MOD16 GPP) agrees better with the observed GPP than MOD17 does. The overall root-mean-square error (RMSE) and mean bias of MOD16 GPP are 19.63 $hbox{g C/m}^{2}$ /8-day and $-4.06 hbox{g C/m}^{2}$ /8-day, respectively, which are lower than the corresponding values of MOD17 GPP ( $hbox{RMSE} = 23.82 hbox{g C/}breakhbox{m}^{2}$ /8-day and $ hbox{mean bias} = -9.07 hbox{g C/m}^{2}$ /8-day). This finding suggests the potential to achieve a better assessment of GPP for nonforest ecosystems with a fine resolution.
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  • 85
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: The classification of airborne lidar data is a relevant task in different disciplines. The information about the geometry and the full waveform can be used in order to classify the 3-D point cloud. In Wadden Sea areas, the classification of lidar data is of main interest for the scientific monitoring of coastal morphology and habitats, but it becomes a challenging task due to flat areas with hardly any discriminative objects. For the classification, we combine a conditional random field framework with a random forest approach. By classifying in this way, we benefit from the consideration of context on the one hand and from the opportunity to utilize a high number of classification features on the other hand. We investigate the relevance of different features for the lidar points in coastal areas as well as for the interaction of neighboring points.
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  • 86
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: In this letter, we evaluated the pixel-level and plot-level tree species classification of Scots Pine, Norway Spruce, and deciduous birch in a boreal forest using 64-band AisaEAGLE II hyperspectral data in a wavelength range of 400–1000 nm. First, band selection was performed using a sparse logistic regression-based feature selection algorithm with pixel-level and plot-level data in case of balanced and imbalanced training data. This resulted in 8–11 selected hyperspectral bands, depending on the properties of the data used. We evaluated a tree species classification with 8–11 selected hyperspectral bands directly for a least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM)-based pixel-level classification with a relatively small training set size (0.5%–1.5% of the total data) and obtained an accuracy and kappa of around 93.50% and 0.90, respectively. These results are around 0.53%–0.94% points lower than those obtained using all of the hyperspectral bands. Second, one important wavelength region highlight by the selected bands was used to modify the sensor sensitivity configuration in the Leica Airborne Digital Sensor 40 (ADS40) multispectral sensor. Using a simulation model and the hyperspectral data, the modified and standard Leica ADS40 sensor responses were simulated and compared, and the modified system simulated response indicates a 3%–5% point improvement in the pixel-level and plot-level LS-SVM classification accuracy compared with the simulated responses of the standard Leica ADS40 band configuration.
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  • 87
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: In this letter, an improved algorithm for aerosol retrieval is presented by employing the non-Lambertian forward model (forward model) (NL_FM) in the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) dark target (DT) algorithm to reduce the uncertainties induced when using the Lambertian FM (L_FM). This new algorithm was applied to MODIS measurements of the whole year of 2008 over Eastern China. By comparing the results with that of AERONET, we found that the accuracy of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieval was improved with the regression plots concentrating around the 1 : 1 line and two-thirds falling within the expected error (EE) envelope $hbox{EE} = pm 0.05pm 0.1tau$ (from 53.6% with L_FM to 68.7% with NL_FM at band 0.55 $muhbox{m}$ ). Surprisingly, more accurate retrieval of the AOD demonstrated significantly improved the Ångstrom exponent (AE) retrieval, which is related to particle size parameters. The regression plots tended to concentrate around the 1 : 1 line, and many more fell within the $hbox{EE} = pm 0.4$ from 53.6% with L_FM to 80.9% with NL_FM. These results demonstrate that including the NL_FM in the MODIS DT algorithm has the potential to significantly improve both AOD and AE retrievals with respect to AERONET in comparison to the L_FM used in the current MODIS operational retrievals.
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  • 88
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: We perform a demonstration experiment using the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Unique Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS)/Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Processing System to assess the improvement on trace gas retrievals upon switching to high spectral resolution CrIS radiance measurements (0.625 $hbox{cm}^{-1}$ ). The focus of this study is carbon monoxide retrievals. The experimental high spectral resolution CO retrievals show a remarkable improvement, of almost up to one order of magnitude in the degree of freedom of the signal, with respect to the low-resolution mode. Furthermore, high-resolution CO retrievals show similar skill with respect to existing CO operational products from the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder, Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer, and Measurements of Pollution In The Troposphere instruments, both in terms of spatial variability and degrees of freedom. The results of this research provide evidence to support the need for high spectral resolution CrIS measurements. This is a fundamental prerequisite in guaranteeing continuity to the CO afternoon orbit monitoring as part of a multisatellite uniformly integrated long-term data record of atmospheric trace gases.
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  • 89
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: Waveform diversity design is a vital issue in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems because the waveforms should have good orthogonality, high coherence, and large time–bandwidth product. However, most of the existing waveforms are not suitable for MIMO SAR and difficult to be implemented in a real-life scene. This letter investigates a scheme for designing chirp modulation diversity waveforms with large time–bandwidth product, constant modulus, implementation simplicity, good Doppler tolerance, and orthogonality. The four waveforms are orthogonal on both transmit and receive. The waveform performances are investigated through the correlation and ambiguity functions. Numerical results validate the superiorities of the designed four waveforms in MIMO SAR high-resolution imaging.
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  • 90
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: This letter proposes a multicriteria system to evaluate the accuracy of reconstructed 3-D buildings. Current 3-D evaluation methods are derived from 2-D pixel-based evaluation; however, the difference between 2-D and 3-D evaluation methods is not well presented in previous literature. Most 3-D building evaluation methods concentrate solely on rooftop accuracy while ignoring the degree of accuracy found with regard to walls. To address these problems, this letter designs a multicriteria evaluation system based on three components: volume, surface, and point. The volume accuracy component represents the traditional classification accuracy based on random samples. The surface accuracy component evaluates shape similarity which compares sample and reference buildings, including rooftops and walls, in a true 3-D environment. The point accuracy component measures distance at feature points between the sample building and the reference building. This multicriteria system aims to provide an improved evaluation method for building reconstruction using advanced algorithms and multiplatform data. The system is also expected to provide valuable information to guide applications with different accuracy requirements.
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  • 91
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-04-26
    Description: This letter has tested the canopy height profile (CHP) methodology as a way of effective leaf area index $(hbox{LAI}_{rm e})$ and vertical vegetation profile retrieval at a single-tree level. Waveform and discrete airborne LiDAR data from six swaths, as well as from the combined data of six swaths, were used to extract the $hbox{LAI}_{rm e}$ of a single live Callitris glaucophylla tree. $hbox{LAI}_{rm e}$ was extracted from raw waveform as an intermediate step in the CHP methodology, with two different vegetation-ground reflectance ratios. Discrete point $hbox{LAI}_{rm e}$ estimates were derived from the gap probability using the following: 1) single ground returns and 2) all ground returns. LiDAR $hbox{LAI}_{rm e}$ retrievals were subsequently compared to hemispherical photography estimates, yielding mean values within $pm$ 7% of the latter, depending on the method used. The CHP of a single dead Callitris glaucophylla tree, representing the distribution of vegetation material, was verified with a field profile manually reconstructed from convergent photographs taken with a fixed-focal-length camera. A binwise comparison of the two profiles showed very high correlation between the data reaching ${rm R}^{2}$ of 0.86 for the CHP from combined swaths. Using a study-area-adjusted reflectance ratio improved the correlation between the profiles, but only marginally in comparison to using an arbitrary ratio of 0.5 for the laser wavelength of 1550 nm.
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  • 92
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: The mean squared error of the classical maximum likelihood time-of-flight (ToF) estimator increases dramatically when the signal-to-noise ratio falls below a certain threshold. For narrow-band signals, this well-known threshold effect occurs largely due to the biased outliers which are induced by the local maxima of the source signal autocorrelation function. In our previous work (Part I), we have described a machine learning biosonar-inspired method for reducing the effect of the outlier bias on the accuracy of a single-echo estimate. In this paper, we extend this approach by introducing a method for combining multiple echo signals into a robust ToF estimator which is resilient to outliers. The individual bias-corrected estimates are combined together using the optimal weighted averaging (OWA) scheme which takes into account the uncertainties associated with inlier and outlier measurements. As in the single-echo case, a weak classifier and a bank of phase-shifted unmatched filters are used for estimating the probabilities of appearance of a specific outlier class in a single-echo estimate. Combined with the previously introduced single-echo bias-reduction method, the OWA scheme results in significant improvement in the ToF estimation accuracy.
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  • 93
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: Spectral unmixing aims at finding the spectrally pure constituent materials (also called endmembers) and their respective fractional abundances in each pixel of a hyperspectral image scene. In recent years, sparse unmixing has been widely used as a reliable spectral unmixing methodology. In this approach, the observed spectral vectors are expressed as linear combinations of spectral signatures assumed to be known a priori and presented in a large collection, termed spectral library or dictionary, usually acquired in laboratory. Sparse unmixing has attracted much attention as it sidesteps two common limitations of classic spectral unmixing approaches, namely, the lack of pure pixels in hyperspectral scenes and the need to estimate the number of endmembers in a given scene, which are very difficult tasks. However, the high mutual coherence of spectral libraries, jointly with their ever-growing dimensionality, strongly limits the operational applicability of sparse unmixing. In this paper, we introduce a two-step algorithm aimed at mitigating the aforementioned limitations. The algorithm exploits the usual low dimensionality of the hyperspectral data sets. The first step, which is similar to the multiple signal classification array signal processing algorithm, identifies a subset of the library elements, which contains the endmember signatures. Because this subset has cardinality much smaller than the initial number of library elements, the sparse regression we are led to is much more well conditioned than the initial one using the complete library. The second step applies collaborative sparse regression, which is a form of structured sparse regression, exploiting the fact that only a few spectral signatures in the library are active. The effectiveness of the proposed approach, termed MUSIC-CSR, is extensively validated using both simulated and real hyperspectral data sets.
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  • 94
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: In order to obtain high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) images, the multichannel in azimuth synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system has been adopted to deal with the contradiction problem between high resolution and low pulse repetition frequency (PRF). In this paper, a novel channel-calibration method is proposed for the multichannel in azimuth HRWS SAR imaging system. During the channel calibration, the mismatch between the channels, which results from the gain-phase error and the range sampling time error, is first corrected by the coarse-calibration processing in the range frequency domain. Then, the along azimuth baseline measurement error is estimated. Considering the range variance in the residual phase error, the data are processed in blocks along the range time domain, and the error of every subblock data is estimated. After that, a fitting and filtering is implemented along the range to the estimated values of the phase error of all subblocks. The range-variant phase error is then compensated using their estimated values. After channel calibration, this paper also presents a new Doppler ambiguity suppression algorithm which nulls the ambiguity components in the Doppler domain. The newly proposed algorithm outperforms the post-Doppler ambiguity suppression algorithm. The airborne real measured scan synthetic aperture radar data, which are acquired by a seven-channel in azimuth SAR imaging system with the system working at X-band, are utilized to demonstrate the performance of the newly proposed channel-calibration method and the new Doppler ambiguity suppression algorithm.
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  • 95
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: The linear range walk yields a significant range–azimuth coupling effect in a highly squinted synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Although the linear range walk correction (LRWC) technique can effectively mitigate such coupling effect, it causes azimuth variation in the resulting signal and, as such, the so-called “azimuth-shift invariance” property becomes invalid. In order to eliminate the azimuth variation, a new spectrum processing approach based on azimuth resampling is proposed in this paper. After performing the LRWC, the azimuth resampling is carried out in the 2-D frequency domain and transforms the signal spectrum to be equivalent to that of a broadside SAR. For squinted beamsteering SAR (BS-SAR), e.g., spotlight SAR, sliding spotlight SAR, and Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans SAR, the azimuth resampling is combined with the azimuth signal reconstruction algorithm. As a result, both the azimuth variation, which is induced by the LRWC, and the aliasing, which is caused by antenna beam steering, can be avoided. Therefore, after the azimuth resampling, the squinted SAR data can be focused by exploiting a conventional broadside SAR imaging algorithm. An analysis of the motion error for airborne SAR data processing is also provided. Simulation and real data results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
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  • 96
    Publication Date: 2014-03-05
    Description: This paper presents a sparse multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) array and sparse frequency ground-penetrating radar (GPR) imaging scheme based on compressed sensing (CS). Since the targets of interest for GPR are usually sparse, the number of the MIMO array elements and frequencies can be reduced using CS theory. Thus, the system complexity and data acquisition time can be reduced accordingly. Considering the serious clutter in forward-looking GPR, we propose two methods for the CS reconstruction in clutter environment. The first one is a clutter suppression preprocessing method, which can effectively suppress the azimuth clutter and short range clutter outside the reconstruction region and significantly improve the reconstruction result. The second one is to determine the regularization parameter for the CS reconstruction in clutter environment. We refer to this reconstruction process as basis pursuit declutter. The proposed imaging scheme can produce pointlike and less cluttered images of sparse targets using fewer array elements and frequencies. Results from simulated data, trihedral reflector, and real buried land mine experimental data are presented to show the validity of the proposed methods. The experimental data are acquired by the vehicle-mounted stepped-frequency forward-looking ground-penetrating virtual aperture radar, which is designed and developed by the National University of Defense Technology.
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  • 97
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-02-01
    Description: High-density airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data with point densities over 50 points/ $hbox{m}^{2}$ provide new opportunities, because previously inaccessible quantities of an individual tree can be derived directly from the data. We introduce a skeleton measurement methodology to extract the diameter at breast height (DBH) from airborne point clouds of trees. The estimates for the DBH are derived by analyzing the point distances to a suitable tree skeleton. The method is validated in three scenarios: 1) on a synthetic point cloud, simulating the point cloud acquisition over a forest; 2) on examples of free-standing and partly occluded trees; and 3) on automatically extracted trees from a sampled forest. The proposed diameter estimation performed well in all three scenarios, although influences of the tree extraction method and the field validation could not be fully excluded.
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  • 98
    Publication Date: 2014-02-01
    Description: Accurate focusing of highly squinted azimuth-variant bistatic synthetic aperture radar data is a difficult issue due to the relatively large range migration, sensibility of the higher order terms, and the inherent geometric variance. To accommodate for this problem, extended azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling algorithm is investigated in this letter. First, range–azimuth coupling is mitigated through a linear range walk correction operation, and then, bulk secondary range compression is implemented to compensate the residual range cell migration and cross-coupling terms. Following which, the characteristics of the azimuth-dependent quadratic and cubic phase terms are analyzed, and modified scaling coefficients are derived by adopting higher order approximation and incorporating the azimuth-dependent range offset caused by the inherent geometric configuration. Compared with traditional nonlinear chirp scaling method, large azimuth depth of focusing can be realized without changing the overall procedure. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
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  • 99
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    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
    Publication Date: 2014-02-01
    Description: An improved reconstruction algorithm is proposed for compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) on oil spill detection. Based on the differences in statistical behavior between open and oil-covered sea surfaces, the proposed algorithm can iteratively reconstruct quad-pol SAR images from CP SAR data. During the experiment, it outperformed two existing compact SAR reconstruction algorithms in terms of both statistical and information theoretical analysis.
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  • 100
    Publication Date: 2014-02-01
    Description: This letter introduces a novel estimator of equivalent number of looks (ENL) that can be applied to any distribution of texture model, i.e., an estimator that is texture invariant. The novel estimator is the Development of Trace Moments (DTM), which cancels the textural variation using trace moments. Five forms of the DTM estimator using submatrices are presented and compared with each other. The results show that the full-dimensional matrix form seems to be the best in performance and computational complexity. The experiments were performed using simulated and real data. The comparisons among all the existing methods of ENL estimation in the product model of the clutter, such as K-distribution and G0 distribution, show the performance of the DTM estimator to be the best if there is a sufficient number of samples. The global and local ENL estimations of the real data of San Francisco are analyzed, and the results agree with the simulated case. This shows that the DTM always gives a good result, particularly in the global estimation of ENL. Therefore, it can be concluded that the DTM estimator is robust to any distribution model, with low computational complexity and high accuracy, particularly in wide areas with similar scattering mechanism.
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