We propose a scalable multiple-output generalization of unscented and extended Gaussian processes. These algorithms have been designed to handle general likelihood models by linearizing them using a Taylor series or the Unscented Transform in a variational inference framework. We build upon random feature approximations of Gaussian process covariance functions and show that, on small-scale single-task problems, our methods can attain similar performance as the original algorithms while having less computational cost. We also evaluate our methods at a larger scale on MNIST and on a seismic inversion which is inherently a multi-task problem.

This paper presents an automated approach for the classification of vegetation in natural environments based on high resolution aerial imagery acquired by a low flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Standard colour and texture descriptors are extracted on a frame by frame basis to build a representation of appearance, which is probabilistically classified by a novel multi-class generalisation of the Gaussian Process (GP) developed for this work. A GP approach was selected for probabilistic outputs, and the ability to automatically determine the relevance of each input dimension to each of the C classes in the problem. When learning hyperparameters from N training examples, the new formulation scales at O(N ), rather than O(CN3) for the standard one-vs-all approach. The novel classification framework is trained and validated on a set of manual labels, and then queried to visualise a map of vegetation type under the UAV flight path. Mapping results are presented for a region of farmland in Northern Queensland, Australia that is infested with two invasive introduced tree species.