Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images: three tricks and a new supervised learning setting

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images has been the subject of many studies in recent years. In the presence of only very few labeled pixels, this task becomes challenging. In this paper we address the following two research questions: 1) Can a simple neural network with just a single hidden layer achieve state of the art performance in the presence of few labeled pixels? 2) How is the performance of hyperspectral image classification methods affected when using disjoint train and test sets? We give a positive answer to the first question by using three tricks within a very basic shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture: a tailored loss function, and smooth- and label-based data augmentation. The tailored loss function enforces that neighborhood wavelengths have similar contributions to the features generated during training. A new label-based technique here proposed favors selection of pixels in smaller classes, which is beneficial in the presence of very few labeled pixels and skewed class distributions. To address the second question, we introduce a new sampling procedure to generate disjoint train and test set. Then the train set is used to obtain the CNN model, which is then applied to pixels in the test set to estimate their labels. We assess the efficacy of the simple neural network method on five publicly available hyperspectral images. On these images our method significantly outperforms considered baselines. Notably, with just 1% of labeled pixels per class, on these datasets our method achieves an accuracy that goes from 86.42% (challenging dataset) to 99.52% (easy dataset). Furthermore we show that the simple neural network method improves over other baselines in the new challenging supervised setting. Our analysis substantiates the highly beneficial effect of using the entire image (so train and test data) for constructing a model.Comment: Remote Sensing 201

Automatic Object-Oriented, Spectral-Spatial Feature Extraction Driven by Tobler’s First Law of Geography for Very High Resolution Aerial Imagery Classification

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in UAV Remote Sensing)Aerial image classification has become popular and has attracted extensive research efforts in recent decades. The main challenge lies in its very high spatial resolution but relatively insufficient spectral information. To this end, spatial-spectral feature extraction is a popular strategy for classification. However, parameter determination for that feature extraction is usually time-consuming and depends excessively on experience. In this paper, an automatic spatial feature extraction approach based on image raster and segmental vector data cross-analysis is proposed for the classification of very high spatial resolution (VHSR) aerial imagery. First, multi-resolution segmentation is used to generate strongly homogeneous image objects and extract corresponding vectors. Then, to automatically explore the region of a ground target, two rules, which are derived from Tobler’s First Law of Geography (TFL) and a topological relationship of vector data, are integrated to constrain the extension of a region around a central object. Third, the shape and size of the extended region are described. A final classification map is achieved through a supervised classifier using shape, size, and spectral features. Experiments on three real aerial images of VHSR (0.1 to 0.32 m) are done to evaluate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach. Comparisons to state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in VHSR image classification.Peer Reviewe

A novel band selection and spatial noise reduction method for hyperspectral image classification.

As an essential reprocessing method, dimensionality reduction (DR) can reduce the data redundancy and improve the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. A novel unsupervised DR framework with feature interpretability, which integrates both band selection (BS) and spatial noise reduction method, is proposed to extract low-dimensional spectral-spatial features of HSI. We proposed a new Neighboring band Grouping and Normalized Matching Filter (NGNMF) for BS, which can reduce the data dimension whilst preserve the corresponding spectral information. An enhanced 2-D singular spectrum analysis (E2DSSA) method is also proposed to extract the spatial context and structural information from each selected band, aiming to decrease the intra-class variability and reduce the effect of noise in the spatial domain. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the extracted spectral-spatial low-dimensional features. Experimental results on three publicly available HSI datasets have fully demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed NGNMF-E2DSSA method, which has surpassed a number of state-of-the-art DR methods

Object-based Morphological Profiles for Classification of Remote Sensing Imagery

Morphological operators (MOs) and their enhancements such as morphological profiles (MPs) are subject to a lively scientific contemplation since they are found to be beneficial for, for example, classification of very high spatial resolution panchromatic, multi-, and hyperspectral imagery. They account for spatial structures with differing magnitudes and, thus, provide a comprehensive multilevel description of an image. In this paper, we introduce the concept of object-based MPs (OMPs) to also encode shape-related, topological, and hierarchical properties of image objects in an exhaustive way. Thereby, we seek to benefit from the so-called object-based image analysis framework by partitioning the original image into objects with a segmentation algorithm on multiple scales. The obtained spatial entities (i.e., objects) are used to aggregate multiple sequences obtained with MOs according to statistical measures of central tendency. This strategy is followed to simultaneously preserve and characterize shape properties of objects and enable both the topological and hierarchical decompositions of an image with respect to the progressive application of MOs. Subsequently, supervised classification models are learned by considering this additionally encoded information. Experimental results are obtained with a random forest classifier with heuristically tuned hyperparameters and a wrapper-based feature selection scheme. We evaluated the results for two test sites of panchromatic WorldView-II imagery, which was acquired over an urban environment. In this setting, the proposed OMPs allow for significant improvements with respect to classification accuracy compared to standard MPs (i.e., obtained by paired sequences of erosion, dilation, opening, closing, opening by top-hat, and closing by top-hat operations)

A hyperspectral image classifiers within wireless sensor network in extreme environments

Progress in the field of computer networks has produced many areas of researches which paved the way for studying many new application

Spectral and Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Images Based on ICA and Reduced Morphological Attribute Profiles

The availability of hyperspectral images with improved spectral and spatial resolutions provides the opportunity to obtain accurate land-cover classification. In this paper, a novel methodology that combines spectral and spatial information for supervised hyperspectral image classification is proposed. A feature reduction strategy based on independent component analysis is the main core of the spectral analysis, where the exploitation of prior information coupled to the evaluation of the reconstruction error assures the identification of the best class-informative subset of independent components. Reduced attribute profiles (APs), which are designed to address well-known issues related to information redundancy that affect the common morphological APs, are then employed for the modeling and fusion of the contextual information. Four real hyperspectral data sets, which are characterized by different spectral and spatial resolutions with a variety of scene typologies (urban, agriculture areas), have been used for assessing the accuracy and generalization capabilities of the proposed methodology. The obtained results demonstrate the classification effectiveness of the proposed approach in all different scene typologies, with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques