Accurate mapping of individual trees is essential for ecological monitoring and forest management. Orthomosaic imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is widely used, but stitching artifacts and heavy preprocessing limit its suitability for field deployment. This study explores the use of raw UAV imagery for palm detection and crown-center localization in tropical forests. Two research questions are addressed: (1) how detection performance varies across orthomosaic and raw imagery, including within-domain and cross-domain transfer, and (2) to what extent crown-center annotations improve localization accuracy beyond bounding-box centroids. Using state-of-the-art detectors and keypoint models, we show that raw imagery yields superior performance in deployment-relevant scenarios, while orthomosaics retain value for robust cross-domain generalization. Incorporating crown-center annotations in training further improves localization and provides precise tree positions for downstream ecological analyses. These findings offer practical guidance for UAV-based biodiversity and conservation monitoring.

Palms play an outsized role in tropical forests and are important resources for humans and wildlife. A central question in tropical ecosystems is understanding palm distribution and abundance. However, accurately identifying and localizing palms in geospatial imagery presents significant challenges due to dense vegetation, overlapping canopies, and variable lighting conditions in mixed-forest landscapes. Addressing this, we introduce PalmProbNet, a probabilistic approach utilizing transfer learning to analyze high-resolution UAV-derived orthomosaic imagery, enabling the detection of palm trees within the dense canopy of the Ecuadorian Rainforest. This approach represents a substantial advancement in automated palm detection, effectively pinpointing palm presence and locality in mixed tropical rainforests. Our process begins by generating an orthomosaic image from UAV images, from which we extract and label palm and non-palm image patches in two distinct sizes. These patches are then used to train models with an identical architecture, consisting of an unaltered pre-trained ResNet-18 and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with specifically trained parameters. Subsequently, PalmProbNet employs a sliding window technique on the landscape orthomosaic, using both small and large window sizes to generate a probability heatmap. This heatmap effectively visualizes the distribution of palms, showcasing the scalability and adaptability of our approach in various forest densities. Despite the challenging terrain, our method demonstrated remarkable performance, achieving an accuracy of 97.32% and a Cohen's kappa of 94.59% in testing.

Understanding the spatial distribution of palms within tropical forests is essential for effective ecological monitoring, conservation strategies, and the sustainable integration of natural forest products into local and global supply chains. However, the analysis of remotely sensed data in these environments faces significant challenges, such as overlapping palm and tree crowns, uneven shading across the canopy surface, and the heterogeneous nature of the forest landscapes, which often affect the performance of palm detection and segmentation algorithms. To overcome these issues, we introduce PalmDSNet, a deep learning framework for real-time detection, segmentation, and counting of canopy palms. Additionally, we employ a bimodal reproduction algorithm that simulates palm spatial propagation to further enhance the understanding of these point patterns using PalmDSNet's results. We used UAV-captured imagery to create orthomosaics from 21 sites across western Ecuadorian tropical forests, covering a gradient from the everwet Chocó forests near Colombia to the drier forests of southwestern Ecuador. Expert annotations were used to create a comprehensive dataset, including 7,356 bounding boxes on image patches and 7,603 palm centers across five orthomosaics, encompassing a total area of 449 hectares. By combining PalmDSNet with the bimodal reproduction algorithm, which optimizes parameters for both local and global spatial variability, we effectively simulate the spatial distribution of palms in diverse and dense tropical environments, validating its utility for advanced applications in tropical forest monitoring and remote sensing analysis.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) provide exceptional spatial and spectral resolution of a scene, crucial for various remote sensing applications. However, the high dimensionality, presence of noise and outliers, and the need for precise labels of HSIs present significant challenges to HSIs analysis, motivating the development of performant HSI clustering algorithms. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised HSI clustering algorithm, Superpixel-based and Spatially-regularized Diffusion Learning (S2DL), which addresses these challenges by incorporating rich spatial information encoded in HSIs into diffusion geometry-based clustering. S2DL employs the Entropy Rate Superpixel (ERS) segmentation technique to partition an image into superpixels, then constructs a spatially-regularized diffusion graph using the most representative high-density pixels. This approach reduces computational burden while preserving accuracy. Cluster modes, serving as exemplars for underlying cluster structure, are identified as the highest-density pixels farthest in diffusion distance from other highest-density pixels. These modes guide the labeling of the remaining representative pixels from ERS superpixels. Finally, majority voting is applied to the labels assigned within each superpixel to propagate labels to the rest of the image. This spatial-spectral approach simultaneously simplifies graph construction, reduces computational cost, and improves clustering performance. S2DL's performance is illustrated with extensive experiments on three publicly available, real-world HSIs: Indian Pines, Salinas, and Salinas A. Additionally, we apply S2DL to landscape-scale, unsupervised mangrove species mapping in the Mai Po Nature Reserve, Hong Kong, using a Gaofen-5 HSI. The success of S2DL in these diverse numerical experiments indicates its efficacy on a wide range of important unsupervised remote sensing analysis tasks.

Monitoring changes within the land surface and open water bodies is critical for natural resource management, conservation, and environmental policy. While the use of satellite imagery for these purposes is common, fine-scale change detection can be a technical challenge. Difficulties arise from variable atmospheric conditions and the problem of assigning pixels to individual objects. We examined the degree to which two machine learning approaches can better characterize change detection in the context of a current conservation challenge, artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM). We obtained Sentinel-2 imagery and consulted with domain experts to construct an open-source labeled land-cover change dataset. The focus of this dataset is the Madre de Dios (MDD) region in Peru, a hotspot of ASGM activity. We also generated datasets of active ASGM areas in other countries (Venezuela, Indonesia, and Myanmar) for out-of-sample testing. With these labeled data, we utilized a supervised (E-ReCNN) and semi-supervised (SVM-STV) approach to study binary and multi-class change within mining ponds in the MDD region. Additionally, we tested how the inclusion of multiple channels, histogram matching, and La*b* color metrics improved the performance of the models and reduced the influence of atmospheric effects. Empirical results show that the supervised E-ReCNN method on 6-Channel histogram-matched images generated the most accurate detection of change not only in the focal region (Kappa: 0.92 (± 0.04), Jaccard: 0.88 (± 0.07), F1: 0.88 (± 0.05)) but also in the out-of-sample prediction regions (Kappa: 0.90 (± 0.03), Jaccard: 0.84 (± 0.04), and F1: 0.77 (± 0.04)). While semi-supervised methods did not perform as accurately on 6- or 10-channel imagery, histogram matching and the inclusion of La*b* metrics generated accurate results with low memory and resource costs. These results show that E-ReCNN is capable of accurately detecting specific and object-oriented environmental changes related to ASGM. E-ReCNN is scalable to areas outside the focal area and is a method of change detection that can be extended to other forms of land-use modification.

Hyperspectral images encode rich structure that can be ex-ploited for material discrimination by machine learning al-gorithms. This article introduces the Active Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (ADVIS) for active mate-rial discrimination. ADVIS selects high-purity, high-density pixels that are far in diffusion distance (a data-dependent met-ric) from other high-purity, high-density pixels in the hyper-spectral image. The ground truth labels of these pixels are queried and propagated to the rest of the image. The ADVIS active learning algorithm is shown to strongly outperform its fully unsupervised clustering algorithm counterpart, suggesting that the incorporation of a very small number of carefully-selected ground truth labels can result in substantially supe-rior material discrimination in hyperspectral images.

Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is an introduced fungal disease that is causing the widespread death of ash trees across Europe. Remote sensing hyperspectral images encode rich structure that has been exploited for the detection of dieback disease in ash trees using supervised machine learning techniques. However, to understand the state of forest health at landscape-scale, accurate unsupervised approaches are needed. This article investigates the use of the unsupervised Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (D-VIS) clustering algorithm for the detection of ash dieback disease in a forest site near Cambridge, United Kingdom. The unsupervised clustering presented in this work has high overlap with the supervised classification of previous work on this scene (overall accuracy = 71%). Thus, unsupervised learning may be used for the remote detection of ash dieback disease without the need for expert labeling.

Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is an important source of income for many households, but it can have large social and environmental effects, especially in rainforests of developing countries. The Sentinel-2 satellites collect multispectral images that can be used for the purpose of detecting changes in water extent and quality which indicates the locations of mining sites. This work focuses on the recognition of ASGM activities in Peruvian Amazon rainforests. We tested several semi-supervised classifiers based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to detect the changes of water bodies from 2019 to 2021 in the Madre de Dios region, which is one of the global hotspots of ASGM activities. Experiments show that SVM-based models can achieve reasonable performance for both RGB (using Cohen's κ 0.49) and 6-channel images (using Cohen's κ 0.71) with very limited annotations. The efficacy of incorporating Lab color space for change detection is analyzed as well.

In this work, a novel algorithm called SVM with Shape-adaptive Reconstruction and Smoothed Total Variation (SaR-SVM-STV) is introduced to classify hyperspectral images, which makes full use of spatial and spectral information. The Shape-adaptive Reconstruction (SaR) is introduced to preprocess each pixel based on the Pearson Correlation be-tween pixels in its shape-adaptive (SA) region. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are trained to estimate the pixel-wise probability maps of each class. Then the Smoothed Total Variation (STV) model is applied to denoise and generate the final classification map. Experiments show that SaR-SVM-STY outperforms the SVM-STV method with a few training labels, demonstrating the significance of reconstructing hy-perspectral images before classification.

We consider the high-resolution imaging problem of 3D point source image recovery from 2D data using a method based on point spread function (PSF) engineering. The method involves a new technique, recently proposed by S.~Prasad, based on the use of a rotating PSF with a single lobe to obtain depth from defocus. The amount of rotation of the PSF encodes the depth position of the point source. Applications include high-resolution single molecule localization microscopy as well as the problem addressed in this paper on localization of space debris using a space-based telescope. The localization problem is discretized on a cubical lattice where the coordinates of nonzero entries represent the 3D locations and the values of these entries the fluxes of the point sources. Finding the locations and fluxes of the point sources is a large-scale sparse 3D inverse problem. A new nonconvex regularization method with a data-fitting term based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is proposed for 3D localization for the Poisson noise model. In addition, we propose a new scheme of estimation of the source fluxes from the KL data-fitting term. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency and stability of the algorithms that are trained on a random subset of image data before being applied to other images. Our 3D localization algorithms can be readily applied to other kinds of depth-encoding PSFs as well.

We consider the problem of joint three-dimensional (3D) localization and material classification of unresolved space debris using a multispectral rotating point spread function (RPSF). The use of RPSF allows one to estimate the 3D locations of point sources from their rotated images acquired by a single 2D sensor array, since the amount of rotation of each source image about its x, y location depends on its axial distance z. Using multispectral images, with one RPSF per spectral band, we are able not only to localize the 3D positions of the space debris but also classify their material composition. We propose a three-stage method for achieving joint localization and classification. In stage 1, we adopt an optimization scheme for localization in which the spectral signature of each material is assumed to be uniform, which significantly improves efficiency and yields better localization results than possible with a single spectral band. In stage 2, we estimate the spectral signature and refine the localization result via an alternating approach. We process classification in the final stage. Both Poisson noise and Gaussian noise models are considered, and the implementation of each is discussed. Numerical tests using multispectral data from NASA show the efficiency of our three-stage approach and illustrate the improvement of point source localization and spectral classification from using multiple bands over a single band.

This paper is concerned with deblurring and spectral analysis of ground-based astronomical images of space objects. A numerical approach is provided for deblurring and sparse unmixing of ground-based hyperspectral images (HSIs) of objects taken through atmospheric turbulence. Hyperspectral imaging systems capture a three-dimensional (3D) datacube (tensor) containing two-dimensional (2D) spatial information and one-dimensional (1D) spectral information at each spatial location. Pixel intensities vary with wavelength bands, providing a spectral trace of intensity values and generating a spatial map of spectral variation (spectral signatures of materials). The deblurring and spectral unmixing problem is quite challenging since the point spread function (PSF) depends on the imaging system as well as the seeing conditions and is wavelength varying. We show how to efficiently construct an optimal Kronecker product-based preconditioner, and provide numerical methods for estimating the multiple PSFs using spectral data from an isolated (guide) star for joint deblurring and sparse unmixing of HSI datasets in order to spectrally analyze the image objects. The methods are illustrated with numerical experiments on a commonly used test example, a simulated HSI of the Hubble Space Telescope satellite.

Because of wavelength-dependent atmospheric turbulence blurring, a coded-aperture snapshot spectral imager (CASSI) multiplexes blurred hyperspectral images of space objects in a single blurred and noisy snapshot. An algorithm is proposed to deconvolving such images.

We present double random projection methods for reconstruction of imaging data. The methods draw upon recent results in the random projection literature, particularly on low-rank matrix approximations, and the reconstruction algorithm has only two simple and noniterative steps, while the reconstruction error is close to the error of the optimal low-rank approximation by the truncated singular-value decomposition. We extend the often-required symmetric distributions of entries in a random-projection matrix to asymmetric distributions, which can be more easily implementable on imaging devices. Experimental results are provided on the subsampling of natural images and hyperspectral images, and on simulated compressible matrices. Comparisons with other random projection methods are also provided.

A matrix ! is completely positive if it has a nonnegative factorization ! = !!! where ! is element wise nonnegative. The smallest number of columns in such a matrix ! is called the cp-rank of !. The !×! completely positive matrices form a closed convex cone and its dual is the cone of co-positive matrices. A completely positive matrix is doubly nonnegative – it is positive semi definite and it is element wise nonnegative. The !×! doubly nonnegative matrices also form a closed convex cone which, for ! > 4, strictly contains the cone of completely positive matrices. Every optimization problem with quadratic objective function, linear constrains and binary variables can be equivalently written as a linear problem over the completely positive cone. However, the problem of checking whether a given matrix is completely positive is NP-hard. A bound for the optimal value can be obtained by replacing the completely positive cone by the doubly nonnegative cone. In the talk I will show how one can generate co-positive cuts for this relaxation. I will also describe some recent results on the cp-rank. Using Large-scale Matrix Factorizations to Identify Users of Social Networks Michael W. Berry Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The University of Tennessee Abstract Users of social media interact with the network and its users. Each interaction creates network specific data between the engaged users and the chosen social avenue. Over time, these engagements accumulate to describe the user's social fingerprint, an identity which encapsulates the user's persona on the network. The agglomeration of this information showcases the user's activity on the social network and establishes a traceable social fingerprint. These fingerprints can be tracked and stored as large matrices representing the quantity and occurrence of observed user behavior. We seek to apply large-scale matrix factorization techniques to establish the signature component vector of a social network user's identity. The preliminary results presented will demonstrate that a user's social finger-print is both quantifiable and identifiable on a social network through out time.Users of social media interact with the network and its users. Each interaction creates network specific data between the engaged users and the chosen social avenue. Over time, these engagements accumulate to describe the user's social fingerprint, an identity which encapsulates the user's persona on the network. The agglomeration of this information showcases the user's activity on the social network and establishes a traceable social fingerprint. These fingerprints can be tracked and stored as large matrices representing the quantity and occurrence of observed user behavior. We seek to apply large-scale matrix factorization techniques to establish the signature component vector of a social network user's identity. The preliminary results presented will demonstrate that a user's social finger-print is both quantifiable and identifiable on a social network through out time. This is a joint work with Denise R. Koessler.

We present simulation-based studies of the use of compressively sensed spectral-polarimetric spatial image data from a solarilluminated reflecting surface to recover its material signature, three-dimensional (3D) shape, pose, and degree of surface roughness. The spatial variations of the polarimetric BRDF around glint points contain unique information about the shape and roughness of the reflecting surface that is revealed most dramatically in polarization-difference maps from which the spatially generalized diffusescattering contibutions to brightness are largely absent. Here we employ a specific compressed-sensing protocol, the so-called Coded-Aperture Snapshot Spectral Polarimetric Imager advanced recently by Tsai and Brady, to simulate noisy measurements from which these surface attributes are recovered in a sequential manner. Even in the presence of additive sensor noise, the recovery of these surface attributes for roughened, highly reflecting surfaces seems to be quite robust.

The main aim of this paper is to study total variation (TV) regularization in deblurring and sparse unmixing of hyperspectral images. In the model, we also incorporate blurring operators for dealing with blurring effects, particularly blurring operators for hyperspectral imaging whose point spread functions are generally system dependent and formed from axial optical aberrations in the acquisition system. An alternating direction method is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem efficiently. According to the structure of the TV regularization and sparse unmixing in the model, the convergence of the alternating direction method can be guaranteed. Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the TV and sparsity model and the efficiency of the proposed numerical scheme, and the method is compared to the recent Sparse Unmixing via variable Splitting Augmented Lagrangian and TV method by Iordache et al.

Dimensionality reduction techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) are powerful tools for the analysis of high-dimensional data. In hyperspectral image analysis, nonnegativity of the data can be taken into account, leading to an additive linear model called nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which improves interpretability of the decomposition. Recently, another technique based on under-approximations (NMU) has been introduced, which allows the extraction of features in a recursive way, such as PCA, but preserving nonnegativity, such as NMF. However, for difficult hyperspectral datasets, even NMU can mix some materials together, and is therefore not able to separate of all materials properly for accurate target identification. In this paper we introduce sparse NMU by adding a sparsity constraint on the abundance matrix and use it to extract materials individually in a more efficient way than NMU. This is experimentally demonstrated on a HYDICE image of the San Diego airport.

We present a randomized singular value decomposition (rSVD) method for the purposes of lossless compression, reconstruction, classification, and target detection with hyperspectral (HSI) data. Recent work in low-rank matrix approximations obtained from random projections suggests that these approximations are well suited for randomized dimensionality reduction. Approximation errors for the rSVD are evaluated on HSI, and comparisons aremade to deterministic techniques and as well as to other randomized low-rank matrix approximation methods involving compressive principal component analysis. Numerical tests on real HSI data suggest that the method is promising and is particularly effective for HSI data interrogation.