A dynamic neural network model for the identification of asbestos roofings in hyperspectral images covering a large regional area

Asbestos has been used extensively in several applications. Once it is known as a dangerous mineral, its usage has been prohibited and its identification and remediation play a very important role from the health safety point of view. Nowadays, deep learning techniques are used in many applications, especially for image analysis. They can be used to significantly reduce the time and cost of traditional detection methods. In this paper, taking advantage of asbestos spectral signature, a deep neural network is introduced in order to implement a complete methodology to identify asbestos roofings starting from hyperspectral images in a regional context. The novelty of the proposed approach is a dynamic mixing of models with different features, in order to accommodate classifications on widespread areas of both urban and rural territories. Indeed, the dataset used during the experiments described in this paper is a large one, consisting of many wide hyperspectral images with a geometric resolution of 1 m and with 186 bands, covering an entire region of approximately 8,000 ${\mathrm{km}}^2$. This is in contrast to other works in the literature where the analyzed areas are limited in size and uniform for physical features.