R-FUSE: Robust Fast Fusion of Multi-Band Images Based on Solving a Sylvester Equation

This paper proposes a robust fast multi-band image fusion method to merge a high-spatial low-spectral resolution image and a low-spatial high-spectral resolution image. Following the method recently developed in [1], the generalized Sylvester matrix equation associated with the multi-band image fusion problem is solved in a more robust and efficient way by exploiting the Woodbury formula, avoiding any permutation operation in the frequency domain as well as the blurring kernel invertibility assumption required in [1]. Thanks to this improvement, the proposed algorithm requires fewer computational operations and is also more robust with respect to the blurring kernel compared with the one in [1]. The proposed new algorithm is tested with different priors considered in [1]. Our conclusion is that the proposed fusion algorithm is more robust than the one in [1] with a reduced computational cost.

Multi-Band Image Fusion Based on Spectral Unmixing

This paper presents a multi-band image fusion algorithm based on unsupervised spectral unmixing for combining a high-spatial low-spectral resolution image and a low-spatial high-spectral resolution image. The widely used linear observation model (with additive Gaussian noise) is combined with the linear spectral mixture model to form the likelihoods of the observations. The non-negativity and sum-to-one constraints resulting from the intrinsic physical properties of the abundances are introduced as prior information to regularize this ill-posed problem. The joint fusion and unmixing problem is then formulated as maximizing the joint posterior distribution with respect to the endmember signatures and abundance maps, This optimization problem is attacked with an alternating optimization strategy. The two resulting sub-problems are convex and are solved efficiently using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Experiments are conducted for both synthetic and semi-real data. Simulation results show that the proposed unmixing based fusion scheme improves both the abundance and endmember estimation comparing with the state-of-the-art joint fusion and unmixing algorithms.

Bayesian anti-sparse coding

Sparse representations have proven their efficiency in solving a wide class of inverse problems encountered in signal and image processing. Conversely, enforcing the information to be spread uniformly over representation coefficients exhibits relevant properties in various applications such as digital communications. Anti-sparse regularization can be naturally expressed through an $\ell_{\infty}$-norm penalty. This paper derives a probabilistic formulation of such representations. A new probability distribution, referred to as the democratic prior, is first introduced. Its main properties as well as three random variate generators for this distribution are derived. Then this probability distribution is used as a prior to promote anti-sparsity in a Gaussian linear inverse problem, yielding a fully Bayesian formulation of anti-sparse coding. Two Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are proposed to generate samples according to the posterior distribution. The first one is a standard Gibbs sampler. The second one uses Metropolis-Hastings moves that exploit the proximity mapping of the log-posterior distribution. These samples are used to approximate maximum a posteriori and minimum mean square error estimators of both parameters and hyperparameters. Simulations on synthetic data illustrate the performances of the two proposed samplers, for both complete and over-complete dictionaries. All results are compared to the recent deterministic variational FITRA algorithm.

Fast Spectral Unmixing based on Dykstra's Alternating Projection

This paper presents a fast spectral unmixing algorithm based on Dykstra's alternating projection. The proposed algorithm formulates the fully constrained least squares optimization problem associated with the spectral unmixing task as an unconstrained regression problem followed by a projection onto the intersection of several closed convex sets. This projection is achieved by iteratively projecting onto each of the convex sets individually, following Dyktra's scheme. The sequence thus obtained is guaranteed to converge to the sought projection. Thanks to the preliminary matrix decomposition and variable substitution, the projection is implemented intrinsically in a subspace, whose dimension is very often much lower than the number of bands. A benefit of this strategy is that the order of the computational complexity for each projection is decreased from quadratic to linear time. Numerical experiments considering diverse spectral unmixing scenarios provide evidence that the proposed algorithm competes with the state-of-the-art, namely when the number of endmembers is relatively small, a circumstance often observed in real hyperspectral applications.

Hyperspectral pansharpening: a review

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

Bayesian estimation of the multifractality parameter for image texture using a Whittle approximation

Texture characterization is a central element in many image processing applications. Multifractal analysis is a useful signal and image processing tool, yet, the accurate estimation of multifractal parameters for image texture remains a challenge. This is due in the main to the fact that current estimation procedures consist of performing linear regressions across frequency scales of the two-dimensional (2D) dyadic wavelet transform, for which only a few such scales are computable for images. The strongly non-Gaussian nature of multifractal processes, combined with their complicated dependence structure, makes it difficult to develop suitable models for parameter estimation. Here, we propose a Bayesian procedure that addresses the difficulties in the estimation of the multifractality parameter. The originality of the procedure is threefold: The construction of a generic semi-parametric statistical model for the logarithm of wavelet leaders; the formulation of Bayesian estimators that are associated with this model and the set of parameter values admitted by multifractal theory; the exploitation of a suitable Whittle approximation within the Bayesian model which enables the otherwise infeasible evaluation of the posterior distribution associated with the model. Performance is assessed numerically for several 2D multifractal processes, for several image sizes and a large range of process parameters. The procedure yields significant benefits over current benchmark estimators in terms of estimation performance and ability to discriminate between the two most commonly used classes of multifractal process models. The gains in performance are particularly pronounced for small image sizes, notably enabling for the first time the analysis of image patches as small as 64x64 pixels.

Fast Fusion of Multi-Band Images Based on Solving a Sylvester Equation

This paper proposes a fast multi-band image fusion algorithm, which combines a high-spatial low-spectral resolution image and a low-spatial high-spectral resolution image. The well admitted forward model is explored to form the likelihoods of the observations. Maximizing the likelihoods leads to solving a Sylvester equation. By exploiting the properties of the circulant and downsampling matrices associated with the fusion problem, a closed-form solution for the corresponding Sylvester equation is obtained explicitly, getting rid of any iterative update step. Coupled with the alternating direction method of multipliers and the block coordinate descent method, the proposed algorithm can be easily generalized to incorporate prior information for the fusion problem, allowing a Bayesian estimator. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the same performance as existing algorithms with the advantage of significantly decreasing the computational complexity of these algorithms.

Hyperspectral and Multispectral Image Fusion based on a Sparse Representation

This paper presents a variational based approach to fusing hyperspectral and multispectral images. The fusion process is formulated as an inverse problem whose solution is the target image assumed to live in a much lower dimensional subspace. A sparse regularization term is carefully designed, relying on a decomposition of the scene on a set of dictionaries. The dictionary atoms and the corresponding supports of active coding coefficients are learned from the observed images. Then, conditionally on these dictionaries and supports, the fusion problem is solved via alternating optimization with respect to the target image (using the alternating direction method of multipliers) and the coding coefficients. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm when compared with the state-of-the-art fusion methods.

Bayesian Fusion of Multi-Band Images

In this paper, a Bayesian fusion technique for remotely sensed multi-band images is presented. The observed images are related to the high spectral and high spatial resolution image to be recovered through physical degradations, e.g., spatial and spectral blurring and/or subsampling defined by the sensor characteristics. The fusion problem is formulated within a Bayesian estimation framework. An appropriate prior distribution exploiting geometrical consideration is introduced. To compute the Bayesian estimator of the scene of interest from its posterior distribution, a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is designed to generate samples asymptotically distributed according to the target distribution. To efficiently sample from this high-dimension distribution, a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo step is introduced in the Gibbs sampling strategy. The efficiency of the proposed fusion method is evaluated with respect to several state-of-the-art fusion techniques. In particular, low spatial resolution hyperspectral and multispectral images are fused to produce a high spatial resolution hyperspectral image.

Nonlinear hyperspectral unmixing with robust nonnegative matrix factorization

This paper introduces a robust mixing model to describe hyperspectral data resulting from the mixture of several pure spectral signatures. This new model not only generalizes the commonly used linear mixing model, but also allows for possible nonlinear effects to be easily handled, relying on mild assumptions regarding these nonlinearities. The standard nonnegativity and sum-to-one constraints inherent to spectral unmixing are coupled with a group-sparse constraint imposed on the nonlinearity component. This results in a new form of robust nonnegative matrix factorization. The data fidelity term is expressed as a beta-divergence, a continuous family of dissimilarity measures that takes the squared Euclidean distance and the generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence as special cases. The penalized objective is minimized with a block-coordinate descent that involves majorization-minimization updates. Simulation results obtained on synthetic and real data show that the proposed strategy competes with state-of-the-art linear and nonlinear unmixing methods.