Earth Observation Semantic Data Mining: Latent Dirichlet Allocation-Based Approach

Abstract

Recent advances in remote sensing technology have provided (very) high spatial resolution Earth Observation data with abundant latent semantic information. Conventional data processing algorithms are not capable of extracting the latent semantic information form these data and harness their full potential. As a result, semantic information discovery methods, based on data mining techniques, such as latent Dirichlet allocation and bag of visual words models, can discover the latent information. Despite their crucial rule, there are only a few studies in the field of semantic data mining for remote sensing applications. This article is focused on this shortage. Three different scenarios are used to evaluate the semantic information discovery in various remote sensing applications, including both optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with different spatial resolutions. In the first scenario, semantic discovery method correlated the semantic perception of the user and machine to correct and enhance the user defined Ground Truth map in very high-resolution RGB data. The potential of the semantic discovery is evaluated for wildfire affected area detection in Sentinel-2 data in the second scenario. Finally, in the third scenario, the semantic discovery method is utilized to detect the misclassifications as well as the patches with ambiguous or multiple semantic labels in a Sentinel-1 SAR patch-based benchmark dataset to enhance the robustness and accuracy of the annotation in the dataset. Our results in these three scenarios demonstrated the capability of the data-mining-based semantic information discovery methods for various remote sensing.

Keywords

• Bag of visual words (BOVW)
• benchmark dataset
• data mining
• Earth Observation (EO) semantics
• Ground Truth (GT) map
• latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)