Train Support Vector Machine Using Fuzzy C-means Without a Prior Knowledge for Hyperspectral Image Content Classification

In this paper, a new cooperative classification method called auto-train support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. This new method converts indirectly SVM to an unsupervised classification method. The main disadvantage of conventional SVM is that it needs a priori knowledge about the data to train it. To avoid using this knowledge that is strictly required to train SVM, in this cooperative method, the data, that is, hyperspectral images (HSIs), are first clustered using Fuzzy C-means (FCM); then, the created labels are used to train SVM. At this stage, the image content is classified using the auto-trained SVM. Using FCM, clustering reveals how strongly a pixel is assigned to a class thanks to the fuzzification process. This information leads to gaining two advantages, the first one is that no prior knowledge about the data (known labels) is needed and the second one is that the training data selection is not done randomly (the training data are selected according to their degree of membership to a class). The proposed method gives very promising results. The method is tested on two HSIs, which are Indian Pines and Pavia University. The results obtained have a very high accuracy of the classification and exceed the existing manually trained methods in the literature