In recent years, remote sensing of the Earth surface using images acquired from aircraft or satellites has gained a lot of attention. The acquisition technology has been evolving fast and, as a consequence, many different kinds of sensors (e.g., optical, radar, multispectral, and hyperspectral) are now available to capture different features of the observed scene. One of the main objectives of remote sensing is to monitor changes on the Earth surface. Change detection has been thoroughly studied in the case of images acquired by the same sensors (mainly optical or radar sensors). However, due to the diversity and complementarity of the images, change detection between images acquired with different kinds of sensors (sometimes referred to as heterogeneous sensors) is clearly an interesting problem. A statistical model and a change detection strategy were recently introduced in [J. Prendes, M. Chabert, F. Pascal, A. Giros, and J.-Y. Tourneret, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Florence, Italy, 2014; IEEE Trans. Image Process., 24 (2015), pp. 799--812] to deal with images captured by heterogeneous sensors. The main idea of the suggested strategy was to model the objects contained in an analysis window by mixtures of distributions. The manifold defined by these mixtures was then learned using training data belonging to unchanged areas. The changes were finally detected by thresholding an appropriate distance to the estimated manifold. This paper goes a step further by introducing a Bayesian nonparametric framework allowing us to deal with an unknown number of objects in analysis windows without specifying an upper bound for this number. A Markov random field is also introduced to account for the spatial correlation between neighboring pixels. The proposed change detector is validated using different sets of synthetic and real images (including pairs of optical images and pairs of optical and radar images) showing a significant improvement when compared to existing algorithms.

This paper introduces a Bayesian non parametric (BNP) model associated with a Markov random field (MRF) for detecting changes between remote sensing images acquired by homogeneous or heterogeneous sensors. The proposed model is built for an analysis window which takes advantage of the spatial information via an MRF. The model does not require any a priori knowledge about the number of objects contained in the window thanks to the BNP framework. The change detection strategy can be divided into two steps. First, the segmentation of the two images is performed using a region based approach. Second, the joint statistical properties of the objects in the two images allows an appropriate manifold to be defined. This manifold describes the relationships between the different sensor responses to the observed scene and can be learnt from a training unchanged area. It allows us to build a similarity measure between the images that can be used in many applications such as change detection or image registration. Simulation results conducted on synthetic and real optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images show the efficiency of the proposed method for change detection.

Remote sensing images are commonly used to monitor the earth surface evolution. This surveillance can be conducted by detecting changes between images acquired at different times and possibly by different kinds of sensors. A representative case is when an optical image of a given area is available and a new image is acquired in an emergency situation (resulting from a natural disaster for instance) by a radar satellite. In such a case, images with heterogeneous properties have to be compared for change detection. This paper proposes a new approach for similarity measurement between images acquired by heterogeneous sensors. The approach exploits the considered sensor physical properties and specially the associated measurement noise models and local joint distributions. These properties are inferred through manifold learning. The resulting similarity measure has been successfully applied to detect changes between many kinds of images, including pairs of optical images and pairs of optical-radar images.

This paper introduces a new statistical model for homogeneous images acquired by the same kind of sensor (e.g., two optical images) and heterogeneous images acquired by different sensors (e.g., optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images). The proposed model assumes that each image pixel is distributed according to a mixture of multi-dimensional distributions depending on the noise properties and on the transformation between the actual scene and the image intensities. The parameters of this new model can be estimated by the classical expectation-maximization algorithm. The estimated parameters are finally used to learn the relationships between the different images. This information can be used in many image processing applications, particularly those requiring a similarity measure (e.g., change detection or registration). Simulation results on synthetic and real images show the potential of the proposed model. A brief application to change detection between optical and SAR images is finally investigated.

Teaching a speech processing course in an undergraduate engineering program is a challenge, especially in a country where research is not a priority. We address the concerns of providing a suitable training to students, of designing a syllabus under many constraints, of keeping students motivated and of finding the appropriate way of grading. Constant innovation has proven to be a key in this course's success, encouraging our students to choose our program among others. The increase in enrollment over the years is both an achievement and a challenge. This initiative creates academic prospect in the future of several students and promotes the development of the SP area in our University.