Application Of A Neural Network For Reflectance Spectrum Classification

Traditional reflectance spectrum classification algorithms are based on comparing spectrum across the electromagnetic spectrum anywhere from the ultra-violet to the thermal infrared regions. These methods analyze reflectance on a pixel by pixel basis. Inspired by high performance that Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated in image classification, we applied a neural network to analyze directional reflectance pattern images. By using the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) data, we can reformulate the 4-dimensional into 2 dimensions, namely incident direction x reflected direction x channels. Meanwhile, RIT's micro-DIRSIG model is utilized to simulate additional training samples for improving the robustness of the neural networks training. Unlike traditional classification by using hand-designed feature extraction with a trainable classifier, neural networks create several layers to learn a feature hierarchy from pixels to classifier and all layers are trained jointly. Hence, the our approach of utilizing the angular features are different to traditional methods utilizing spatial features. Although training processing typically has a large computational cost, simple classifiers work well when subsequently using neural network generated features. Currently, most popular neural networks such as VGG, GoogLeNet and AlexNet are trained based on RGB spatial image data. Our approach aims to build a directional reflectance spectrum based neural network to help us to understand from another perspective. At the end of this paper, we compare the difference among several classifiers and analyze the trade-off among neural networks parameters.