Survey of intelligent optical remote sensing image processing

Abstract

With the development of earth observation techniques, a large number of high-resolution remote sensing images can now be acquired by using different types of sensors. Handling these "big" remote sensing data with diverse characteristics is difficult when traditional remote sensing techniques are used. New challenges, such as high-dimensional datasets (high spatial and hyperspectral features), complex structures (nonlinear and overlapped distribution), and optimization problems (high computational complexity), have also emerged. To address these problems, evolutionary computing-based techniques based on biological systems have been widely used for remote sensing image processing. Such techniques possess the following advantages: (1) powerful global optimization capability, acquiring the optimal or nearly optimal solution of objective functions; (2) self-organizing and self-learning capability, learning from original remote sensing data autonomously; and (3) capability of handling multi-objective problem, optimizing the multiple objective function simultaneously because of its population-based characteristics. Evolutionary computing has achieved preliminary success in the field of remote sensing data processing. In this paper, the applications of evolutionary computing to the fields of remote sensing image processing are reviewed, along with feature representation and feature selection, classification and clustering, and sub-pixel-level processing techniques, such as endmember extraction, hyperspectral unmixing, and sub-pixel mapping. Compared with the traditional methods of remote sensing image processing, these new methods are thought to be intelligent and accurate because of their powerful global optimization. For example, their constraints on the characteristics of objective functions, such as their derivatives, are few. They can also generate few assumptions about remote sensing data because of their self-organizing and self-learning capabilities. They can consider a large number of objective functions because of their capability of handling multi-objective problems. In summary, these new methods exhibit intelligent characteristics and high accuracy in remote sensing image processing. Finally, several crucial issues and research directions in the use of evolutionary computing are highlighted: (1) multi-objective optimization for regularization-based ill-posed problems in remote sensing processing, such as hyperspectral unmixing; (2) the discussion on the efficiency of evolutionary computing-based remote sensing processing methods, such as the memetic algorithm, which is a hybrid of evolutionary computing and machine learning, and the speeding up techniques of evolutionary computing-based remote sensing processing methods.