Number Of Spectral Bands Research Articles

A model for inversion of hyperspectral characteristics of phosphate content in mural plaster based on fractional-order differential algorithm

The Dunhuang murals, a significant part of Chinese heritage, have suffered deterioration primarily due to environmental and chemical factors, notably salt damage. This study proposes a sophisticated method that synergizes Fractional Order Differentiation (FOD) and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) to accurately invert the phosphate content in the mural plaster of the Dunhuang paintings. The focal points of the research include: (1) To address the issue of information loss and reduced modeling precision caused by integer-order differentiation algorithms, the FOD method is employed for preprocessing spectral data. This approach ensures the fine spectral differences in the phosphate content of the mural plaster are precisely captured, (2) Utilizing PLSR, the study models the spectral bands identified at a significance level of 0.01 with measured conductivity values, thereby enabling the precise prediction of the phosphate content in the murals. The research outcomes reveal: (1) The FOD method can elucidate the nonlinear characteristics and variation patterns of the mural samples in the spectral data. As the order increases from zero to two, the number of spectral bands meeting the 0.01 significance test initially decreases and then increases. The highest absolute value of the positive correlation coefficient is observed at the 1.9 order, corresponding to the 2077 nm band, (2) For predicting the phosphate content in the murals, the model at the 1.9 order is most suitable for inversion. This model, after cross-validation, achieves a maximum R2 value of 0.861. This study created an efficient FOD-based model for estimating phosphate in mural plaster.

A new snow cover mapping algorithm for Chinese geostationary meteorological satellite FY-4A AGRI data

ABSTRACT China’s second generation of geostationary meteorological satellites Fengyun-4 (FY-4) are equipped with the Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI) which has the advantages of large number of spectral bands and high temporal resolution. To fully leverage these features, a new snow cover (SC) mapping algorithm was proposed, which firstly derives SC map from a single scene image and then combines multi-temporal SC results within one day into a daily SC composite. The novelty of the proposed algorithm includes the utilization of small spatial and temporal divisions to avoid the use of complex kernel-driven models for the correction of bidirectional effects of surface reflectance and a novel framework to merge multi-temporal SC maps by weighting the solar illumination conditions. The SC results were validated against in-situ snow depth measurements, Landsat 8 derived SC data and MODIS SC products. Results indicate that merging multi-temporal SC data can reduce cloud obscuration with the average daily cloud coverage percentage decreasing from about 47.03% for single scene to 35.62% for merged one and slightly improve snow detection accuracy. The overall accuracy (OA) ranges from 95.00% to 96.19%, and the F-score (FS) varies from 77.78% to 87.14% when compared to different reference data, suggesting an overall good performance.

A Novel Hyperspectral Salt Assessment Model for Weathering in Architectural Ruins

Abstract. The Dunhuang murals, a significant part of Chinese heritage, have suffered deterioration primarily due to environmental and chemical factors, notably salt damage. This study proposes a sophisticated method that synergizes Fractional Order Differentiation (FOD) and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) to accurately invert the phosphate content in the Mural Plaster of the Dunhuang paintings. The focal points of the research include: 1) To address the issue of information loss and reduced modeling precision caused by integer order differentiation algorithms, the FOD method is employed for preprocessing hyperspectral data. This approach ensures the fine spectral differences in the phosphate content of the Mural Plaster are precisely captured, 2) Utilizing PLSR, the study models the spectral bands identified at a significance level of 0.01 with measured conductivity values, thereby enabling the precise prediction of the phosphate content in the murals. The research outcomes reveal: 1) The FOD method can elucidate the nonlinear characteristics and variation patterns of the mural samples in the hyperspectral curve.As the order increases from zero to two, the number of spectral bands meeting the 0.01 significance test initially decreases and then increases. The highest absolute value of the positive correlation coefficient is observed at 1.9 orders, corresponding to the 2077 nm band, 2) For predicting the phosphate content in the murals, the model at 1.9 orders is most suitable for inversion. This model, after cross-validation, achieves a maximum R2 value of 0.783. This study created an efficient FOD-based model for estimating phosphate in mural plasters.

Infants' abilities to segment word forms from spectrally degraded speech in the first year of life.

Infants begin to segment word forms from fluent speech-a crucial task in lexical processing-between 4 and 7 months of age. Prior work has established that infants rely on a variety of cues available in the speech signal (i.e., prosodic, statistical, acoustic-segmental, and lexical) to accomplish this task. In two experiments with French-learning 6- and 10-month-olds, we use a psychoacoustic approach to examine if and how degradation of the two fundamental acoustic components extracted from speech by the auditory system, namely, temporal (both frequency and amplitude modulation) and spectral information, impact word form segmentation. Infants were familiarized with passages containing target words, in which frequency modulation (FM) information was replaced with pure tones using a vocoder, while amplitude modulation (AM) was preserved in either 8 or 16 spectral bands. Infants were then tested on their recognition of the target versus novel control words. While the 6-month-olds were unable to segment in either condition, the 10-month-olds succeeded, although only in the 16 spectral band condition. These findings suggest that 6-month-olds need FM temporal cues for speech segmentation while 10-month-olds do not, although they need the AM cues to be presented in enough spectral bands (i.e., 16). This developmental change observed in infants' sensitivity to spectrotemporal cues likely results from an increase in the range of available segmentation procedures, and/or shift from a vowel to a consonant bias in lexical processing between the two ages, as vowels are more affected by our acoustic manipulations. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Although segmenting speech into word forms is crucial for lexical acquisition, the acoustic information that infants' auditory system extracts to process continuous speech remains unknown. We examined infants' sensitivity to spectrotemporal cues in speech segmentation using vocoded speech, and revealed a developmental change between 6 and 10 months of age. We showed that FM information, that is, the fast temporal modulations of speech, is necessary for 6- but not 10-month-old infants to segment word forms. Moreover, reducing the number of spectral bands impacts 10-month-olds' segmentation abilities, who succeed when 16 bands are preserved, but fail with 8 bands.

Spectral imaging based on custom-made multi-strip filter arrays

Spectral imaging technology based on on-chip spectroscopy can find applications in areas including aerospace, industrial and consumer electronics, and so on. Since each application normally requires a different set and number of spectral bands, the development of customized spectroscopy solutions with more compact size and lower cost becomes quite important. In this paper, we demonstrate a compact, highly customizable imaging spectrometer scheme based on custom-made multi-strip filter arrays, which maintains an average high transmission of ∼85%, narrow bandwidth of ∼30nm, and high optical density of ∼OD2 in the blocking regions across the visible to near-infrared waveband. Spectral imaging experiments are conducted, and the accurate reconstruction of sparse spectral image data is demonstrated as well to prove the validity of the proposed scheme. As a result, the work reported in this paper allows researchers to develop customized spectral imaging equipment in a relatively easy way and also has a great potential to be engineered further for scalable production with a quite low cost.

A novel approach for detecting sensor-based semiconductor fault yield classification using convolutional neural networks

<p>In the proposed research, data from the semiconductor industry is considered for analysis. In this research, there is a requirement for significantly more space for storage, processing will take significantly more time, and there will be a significant amount of duplicate data. So, the utilization of dimensionality reduction strategies is required so as to lessen the number of spectral bands while maintaining the maximum amount of relevant information. Our contribution can be broken down into two parts: To begin, we suggest a filter-based technique that we call interband redundancy analysis (IBRA). This method is based on a collinearity analysis that is performed among a band and its neighbors. By performing the given research, redundant bands can be omitted, which in turn significantly brings down the search space. Next, we take the findings of the IBRA and use a wrapper-based technique known as greedy spectral selection (GSS) to choose bands on the basis of the information entropy values of those bands. We are later training a convolutional neural network to evaluate how well the present selection is working. We also propose an optimization algorithm for performance enhancement known as bacterial foraging optimization.</p>

Hyperspectral Image Classification Using Multi-Scale Lightweight Transformer

The distinctive feature of hyperspectral images (HSIs) is their large number of spectral bands, which allows us to identify categories of ground objects by capturing discrepancies in spectral information. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) with attention modules effectively improve the classification accuracy of HSI. However, CNNs are not successful in capturing long-range spectral–spatial dependence. In recent years, Vision Transformer (VIT) has received widespread attention due to its excellent performance in acquiring long-range features. However, it requires calculating the pairwise correlation between token embeddings and has the complexity of the square of the number of tokens, which leads to an increase in the computational complexity of the network. In order to cope with this issue, this paper proposes a multi-scale spectral–spatial attention network with frequency-domain lightweight Transformer (MSA-LWFormer) for HSI classification. This method synergistically integrates CNN, attention mechanisms, and Transformer into the spectral–spatial feature extraction module and frequency-domain fused classification module. Specifically, the spectral–spatial feature extraction module employs a multi-scale 2D-CNN with multi-scale spectral attention (MS-SA) to extract the shallow spectral–spatial features and capture the long-range spectral dependence. In addition, The frequency-domain fused classification module designs a frequency-domain lightweight Transformer that employs the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to convert features from the spatial domain to the frequency domain, effectively extracting global information and significantly reducing the time complexity of the network. Experiments on three classic hyperspectral datasets show that MSA-LWFormer has excellent performance.

Multidecadal grassland fractional cover time series retrieval for Germany from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives

Time series data provided by the Sentinel-2 and Landsat satellite missions offer manifold opportunities for grassland monitoring. The high intra-annual observation density of Sentinel-2 combined with the continuous long-term data record of Landsat enable analyses at seasonal, annual, and decadal scales. Fractional cover estimates of photosynthetic vegetation (PV), non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV), and soil provide essential information to describe grassland conditions and processes. Yet, retrieving consistent grassland fractional cover time series from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery represents a major challenge. In this study, we implemented a multisensor spectral unmixing approach for retrieving multidecadal (i.e., 1984 to 2021) fractional cover time series of PV, NPV, and soil for Germany's permanent grasslands from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives. The spectral consistency of Landsat 5/7/8 and Sentinel-2A/B imagery as well as the coherency of a Sentinel-2-based spectral library to be used across Landsat and Sentinel-2 sensors served as the foundation for implementing the unmixing approach. We then employed regression-based unmixing using synthetic training data from spectral libraries for developing spatially and temporally generalized models. Applying these models to the Landsat and Sentinel-2 data facilitated multidecadal fractional cover mapping at a national-scale. We evaluated the quality of our multidecadal grassland fractional cover time series using statistical validation and linear correspondence analysis. The statistical validation was based on a multitemporal reference dataset spanning 2017 to 2021, derived from very high-resolution (VHR) imagery. Landsat 7/8- and Sentinel-2A/B-derived fractions showed similar Mean Absolute Errors (MAEs), i.e., 0.067 and 0.08 for PV, 0.149 and 0.15 for NPV, and 0.135 and 0.129 for soil. Linear correspondence analysis confirmed consistent PV and NPV fractional cover estimates among Landsat and Sentinel-2 sensors, suggesting similar errors beyond the statistical validation period. However, higher errors and weaker linear correspondence pointed to remaining uncertainties in soil fractional cover estimates. We further showed that the differences in spatial and spectral resolutions, i.e., the pixel size and the number of spectral bands, between Landsat and Sentinel-2 had a minor effect and were well mitigated by the spectral unmixing approach. We finally illustrated the value of the dense time series available for more recent years for describing seasonal trajectories of grassland conditions and land use intensities, as well as the use of the entire time series for analyzing long-term grassland dynamics based on annual fraction anomalies. Our study emphasizes the efficacy of generalized multisensor spectral unmixing approaches for retrieving consistent PV, NPV, and soil cover fractions across space, time, and sensors, providing a valuable means for grassland monitoring.

Lightweight-VGG: A Fast Deep Learning Architecture Based on Dimensionality Reduction and Nonlinear Enhancement for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In the past decade, deep learning methods have proven to be highly effective in the classification of hyperspectral images (HSI), consistently outperforming traditional approaches. However, the large number of spectral bands in HSI data can lead to interference during the learning process. To address this issue, dimensionality reduction techniques can be employed to minimize data redundancy and improve HSI classification performance. Hence, we have developed an efficient lightweight learning framework consisting of two main components. Firstly, we utilized band selection and principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of HSI data, thereby reducing redundancy while retaining essential features. Subsequently, the pre-processed data was input into a modified VGG-based learning network for HSI classification. This method incorporates an improved dynamic activation function for the multi-layer perceptron to enhance non-linearity, and reduces the number of nodes in the fully connected layers of the original VGG architecture to improve speed while maintaining accuracy. This modified network structure, referred to as lightweight-VGG (LVGG), was specifically designed for HSI classification. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three publicly available HSI datasets consistently demonstrated that the LVGG method exhibited similar or better performance compared to other typical methods in the field of HSI classification. Our approach not only addresses the challenge of interference in deep learning methods for HSI classification, but also offers a lightweight and efficient solution for achieving high classification accuracy.

Test-time Training for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution.

The progress on Hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR) is still lagging behind the research of RGB image SR. HSIs usually have a high number of spectral bands, so accurately modeling spectral band interaction for HSI SR is hard. Also, training data for HSI SR is hard to obtain so the dataset is usually rather small. In this work, we propose a new test-time training method to tackle this problem. Specifically, a novel self-training framework is developed, where more accurate pseudo-labels and more accurate LR-HR relationships are generated so that the model can be further trained with them to improve performance. In order to better support our test-time training method, we also propose a new network architecture to learn HSI SR without modeling spectral band interaction and propose a new data augmentation method Spectral Mixup to increase the diversity of the training data at test time. We also collect a new HSI dataset with a diverse set of images of interesting objects ranging from food to vegetation, to materials, and to general scenes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method can improve the performance of pre-trained models significantly after test-time training and outperform competing methods significantly for HSI SR.

Unsupervised Spectral Demosaicing With Lightweight Spectral Attention Networks.

This paper presents a deep learning-based spectral demosaicing technique trained in an unsupervised manner. Many existing deep learning-based techniques relying on supervised learning with synthetic images, often underperform on real-world images, especially as the number of spectral bands increases. This paper presents a comprehensive unsupervised spectral demosaicing (USD) framework based on the characteristics of spectral mosaic images. This framework encompasses a training method, model structure, transformation strategy, and a well-fitted model selection strategy. To enable the network to dynamically model spectral correlation while maintaining a compact parameter space, we reduce the complexity and parameters of the spectral attention module. This is achieved by dividing the spectral attention tensor into spectral attention matrices in the spatial dimension and spectral attention vector in the channel dimension. This paper also presents Mosaic 25 , a real 25-band hyperspectral mosaic image dataset featuring various objects, illuminations, and materials for benchmarking purposes. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional unsupervised methods in terms of spatial distortion suppression, spectral fidelity, robustness, and computational cost. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/polwork/Unsupervised-Spectral-Demosaicing.

Dealing with imperfect data for invasive species detection using multispectral imagery

Detection and monitoring invasive species can provide valuable ecological information to guide management decisions. Multispectral imagery remote sensing may be an ideal tool to address this problem by providing accurate and affordable repeat imagery. However, developing training datasets for remote sensing imagery can be riddled with issues such as matching a training site to a single pixel in target imagery or mixed pixels caused by low invader densities. The multitarget multiple-instance spectral match filter (MTMI-SMF) algorithm accounts for such errors and has low computation costs. Here, we evaluated MTMI-SMF for invasive species detection with National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), RapidEye, and Landsat imagery using Brazilian peppertree (Schinus terebinthifolia) in the Everglades National Park as a case study. MTMI-SMF detected Brazilian peppertree with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.85 for Landsat, 0.82 for RapidEye, and 0.71 NAIP imagery. Invader classification was developed using a threshold calculated from MTMI-SMF image detection confidence values and compared to a random forest classification. MTMI-SMF and random forest classifications had similar overall accuracies with NAIP imagery performing the lowest (an average of 73.6% and 88.9%, respectively) and Landsat performing the highest (an average of 90.9% and 91.4%, respectively). However, due to the relatively rare nature of Brazilian peppertree across this landscape, the overall classification accuracy was not fully representative of detection capabilities. MTMI-SMF outperformed random forest for user accuracy and had comparable producer accuarcy across all three image sources. Classifications primarily relied on the brighter signature of Brazilian peppertree due to the limited number of spectral bands in the multispectral imagery. As a result, confusion was caused by heterogeneous vegetation communities or shrub habitats, which most likely could be resolved with the increased availability of satellite hyperspectral datasets. Our study indicates that MTMI-SMF, a machine-learning approach that allows flexibility in training data, can detect highly problematic invaders using multispectral imagery. This pipeline could be readily adapted to other invaders and ecosystems, as well as different remote sensing image sources, and has low computational requirements. Our study demonstrates that remote sensing technologies and multiple-instance learning algorithms can provide managers with critical tools for tackling the ever-growing, costly, and challenging problem of tracking invasive species' plant spread.

Hyperspectral band selection using a decomposition based multiobjective wrapper approach

Presently, sensors acquire data in a broad spectrum of contiguous bands with a high correlation in the available information among the neighboring bands. Due to the complexity of dealing with a large number of bands, selecting fewer representative spectral bands without compromising the information quantum has gained much attention. However, obtaining an optimum number of spectral bands without deteriorating the information value is a challenging problem. The present study proposes an evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) based wrapper approach for optimal band selection. The efficacy of a wrapper approach depends on the performance of the underlying classifier. In this work, the simultaneous selection of optimal spectral bands and the hyperparameter of the classifier is carried out by applying a new mechanism that uses the power distribution-based interaction strategy for candidate generation. A bi-objective optimization problem is formulated with percentage reduction in bands and the corresponding classification accuracy as the objective functions. Five widely referenced hyperspectral datasets are used to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique selects a significantly lower number of bands while preserving information quantum thereby achieving better classification accuracy. Additionally, a comparison with other EMO techniques confirms the superior performance of the proposed method in finding a lower number of spectral bands without compromising the spectral information.

A novel dimensionality reduction algorithm for Cholangiocarcinoma hyperspectral images

Medical hyperspectral imagery (HSI) has become a promising auxiliary diagnostic tool in the field of medical diagnosis and being offered noninvasive disease diagnosis in many cases. However, the huge number of spectral bands may lead to the curse of dimensionality and increase computational complexity. Thus, dimensionality reduction (DR) is an essential step for hyperspectral preprocessing. To maintain the cubic nature of HSI and extract more discriminative and representative information from original data, we proposed a novel DR method termed tensor-based weight-modified multi-manifold discriminant analysis (TWMDA). In this paper, two weight modified intra-class and inter-class adjacency affinity matrices are constructed to make full use of the class information and strengthen the power of capturing discriminant information from high-dimensional data. After that, balancing the effect of within-class adjacency compactness and between-class adjacency separation to obtain better classification performance in tensor space instead of vector space. Experimental results on Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) microscope hyperspectral data sets prove the efficiency and superiority of the proposed method. Hence, this novel DR approach would be more beneficial for cancer diagnosis based on HSI.

Marine plastic detection using PRISMA hyperspectral satellite imagery in a controlled environment

ABSTRACT The amount of plastics on seawater is causing ecosystem damage to both land areas and water bodies. It is proven that once plastic particles reach the sea, they will be degraded. As their detection is not easy with in situ sampling, remote sensing techniques could help detect and evaluate their impact on ecosystems. To understand the main limitations of detecting floating plastic material through remote images, an a pilot experiment was carried out on an artificial floating plastic target deployed at the Aegean Sea (Greece) within the Plastic Litter Project 2021. Hyperspectral PRISMA, multispectral PlanetScope and visible Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) acquisitions were analysed. A nonlinear unmixing technique was applied to derive the spectral signature of the plastic target; finally, the linear unmixing approach allowed for determining the plastic percentage occupation at the pixel level. Different band combinations of the PRISMA data were selected to evaluate which provided the best result for the detection; one of these band combinations was retrieved via the principal component analysis. Only slight differences were achieved using the different PRISMA band-sets. As expected, since the artificial plastic target had a diameter comparable with the PRISMA spatial resolution (~30 m), its detection was a challenging task caused by the water influence in the pixel (mixed pixels). The detection was realized by benefitting from the high amount of available spectral bands, as confirmed by the comparative test with a PlanetScope image used at its original spatial resolution (3 m) and after degrading it at the PRISMA level. Results demonstrated that an optimal target detection was possible with few spectral bands, only taking advantage of the high spatial resolution (compared with the target dimension). Indeed, unreliable plastic fractions were derived at the PRISMA spatial resolution with a limited number of spectral bands.

Semi-supervised enhanced discriminative local constraint preserving projection for dimensionality reduction of medical hyperspectral images

Microscopic hyperspectral images has the advantage of containing rich spatial and spectral information. However, the large number of spectral bands provides a significant amount of spectral features, but also leads to data redundancy and noise, which seriously affect the recognition and classification performance of the images, as well as increasing the requirements for computation and storage. To address this issue, we propose a dimensionality reduction algorithm named enhanced discriminant local constraint preserving projection (EDLCPP). Specifically, the global spectral attention mechanism focuses on important bands, the high discriminability sample selection module measures the discriminability of samples using a modified average neighborhood margin, the graph construction module preserves the local geometric relationship and discriminant information, and the graph embedding module embeds the constructed graphs into a low-dimensional space to obtain the projection matrices. Experimental results on eight cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) hyperspectral images, Bloodcell1-3, and Bloodcell2-2 datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Spectral band-shifting of multispectral remote-sensing reflectance products: Insights for matchup and cross-mission consistency assessments

Comparing or integrating remote-sensing reflectance, Rrsλsr−1, data from multispectral sensors is hindered by differences in their nominal bands and relative spectral-response functions. Similarly, assessing satellite-to-in situ-matchup assessments of Rrs using autonomous ground radiometers, such as the Ocean Color component of the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET-OC), faces the same challenges. Therefore, spectral band-shifting techniques are required to approximate Rrs in spectral bands that are mutually unavailable. We present a spectral-matching technique (SMTH) using a novel look-up-table (LUT) generated from Rrs obtained from the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) sensor. This LUT consists of nearly 6.3 million unique Rrs spectra, processed from 8893 Level-2 HICO scenes. An extensive in situ hyperspectral dataset (n = 8289) was used to compare the performance of SMTH with three commonly used techniques, namely Melin and Sclep (2015) “MS-QAA” model, linear (LNR) and cubic spline (CS) interpolations. The comprehensive evaluation of eight sensors using in situ dataset revealed that the SMTH has significantly better overall accuracy with respect to spectral band-shifting than the existing approaches. The Bias was improved 7-fold, whereas the root-mean-square difference (RMSD) and mean absolute difference (MAD) were ∼ 15–60% lower. Even so, each model exhibits outstanding performance in certain bands. For instance, the LNR model excels in the 380 nm band, while the MS-QAA emerges as the optimal choice for the 400 and 412 nm bands. SMTH outperforms other models in the green-red region, notably above 600 nm, where most existing ocean-color sensors have a limited number of spectral bands. Despite this variability, all models, showcase satisfactory performance in the 443–560 nm region. Significantly, both SMTH and LNR demonstrated a 100% retrieval rate, the ratio of band-shifted samples to the input samples. In contrast, MS-QAA and CS returned invalid values for 7% and 39% of the input samples, respectively. Further evaluation of regional, global, and composite satellite data suggests that the trophic state significantly influences the model performance. The MS-QAA model exhibited the smallest differences within the oligotrophic waters, characterized by low chlorophyll-a concentrations. In contrast, the SMTH model demonstrates the lowest differences in mesotrophic/eutrophic waters and regions subject to harmful algal blooms. While HICO primarily sampled coastal waters, estuaries, and shallow regions from mid- to low latitudes, there is an opportunity to enhance the representativeness of our LUT by incorporating open-ocean and high-latitude Rrs spectra from the upcoming hyperspectral missions, such as NASA's Plankton, Aerosol, Clouds, ocean Ecosystem (PACE).

Are smallsats taking over bigsats for land Earth observation?

In this work the evolution of the utilization of small satellites for land Earth observation missions is addressed. Scatter and “bubble” plots, supplemented by the calculation of correlation coefficients for pairs of selected variables, are used to identify, qualify and quantify trends. Optical and Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) missions are considered separately. Systems are discriminated as single or constellation, and commercial or government owned. Trends coupling satellite mass to ground sample distance, and number of spectral bands, for optical satellites, and spatial resolution and microwave band for SARs, are also analyzed. The present analysis indicates that smallsats seems to be getting increasingly competitive, that is, they have become an alternative to bigger satellites, for most types of optical missions. On the other hand, the SAR arena still seems to pose a big challenge to satellite miniaturization, in spite of recent remarkable advances obtained on the fielding of smallsat X-band SAR constellations.

HyFormer: Hybrid Grouping-Aggregation Transformer and Wide-Spanning CNN for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution is a practical and challenging task as it requires the reconstruction of a large number of spectral bands. Achieving excellent reconstruction results can greatly benefit subsequent downstream tasks. The current mainstream hyperspectral super-resolution methods mainly utilize 3D convolutional neural networks (3D CNN) for design. However, the commonly used small kernel size in 3D CNN limits the model’s receptive field, preventing it from considering a wider range of contextual information. Though the receptive field could be expanded by enlarging the kernel size, it results in a dramatic increase in model parameters. Furthermore, the popular vision transformers designed for natural images are not suitable for processing HSI. This is because HSI exhibits sparsity in the spatial domain, which can lead to significant computational resource waste when using self-attention. In this paper, we design a hybrid architecture called HyFormer, which combines the strengths of CNN and transformer for hyperspectral super-resolution. The transformer branch enables intra-spectra interaction to capture fine-grained contextual details at each specific wavelength. Meanwhile, the CNN branch facilitates efficient inter-spectra feature extraction among different wavelengths while maintaining a large receptive field. Specifically, in the transformer branch, we propose a novel Grouping-Aggregation transformer (GAT), comprising grouping self-attention (GSA) and aggregation self-attention (ASA). The GSA is employed to extract diverse fine-grained features of targets, while the ASA facilitates interaction among heterogeneous textures allocated to different channels. In the CNN branch, we propose a Wide-Spanning Separable 3D Attention (WSSA) to enlarge the receptive field while keeping a low parameter number. Building upon WSSA, we construct a wide-spanning CNN module to efficiently extract inter-spectra features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our HyFormer.

Radiative Heat Transfer in Models of DC Arc Plasma

The radiative heat transfer in arc plasma models of a free-burning arc and a plasma torch in atmospheric pressure argon is taken into account in a self-consistent way. This is realized by the P1 method for solving the equation of radiative transfer and the multi-band approximation that considers the division of the emitted spectrum into a number of spectral bands. Net emission coefficients are evaluated by solving the equation of radiative transfer in three dimensions in an isothermal cylindrical plasma. The arc plasma parameters of the free-burning arc and the plasma torch obtained accounting for radiative transport have been compared with those from the temperature-dependent net emission coefficient for a radius of 1 mm. The results show that in general, the models applying the net emission coefficient provide results in the arc core close to that using the P1 method. The discrepancy is stronger in the arc periphery and near walls, where the P1 method predicts absorption of radiation.