A Spectral-Texture Kernel-Based Classification Method for Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral image classification is a challenging problem for machine learning methods due to the small number of labelled samples and high spectral variability. In this paper, to solve this problem, a novel superpixel and multi-classifier fusion (SMCF)-based classification method for hyperspectral images is proposed. This method takes full advantage of the spectral information of superpixels and the spatial information of hyperspectral images and includes the following three steps. First, superpixels are used to increase the number of training samples and their spectral diversity. Second, label propagation (LP) is used to classify the hyperspectral images. Although LP is an efficient semi-supervised classification method, the corresponding performance is poor for certain land cover types with dispersed spatial distributions. Thus, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is introduced to classify the hyperspectral images. Finally, the results of the SVM and LP classifiers are combined using our new class-specific weighted fusion algorithm. In the experiments, we selected three widely used and real hyperspectral data sets for evaluation. The final classification performance was evaluated based on two common metrics: the overall accuracy (OA) and the Kappa coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed SMCF method is superior to six well-known classification methods, even when only 1% or less of the labelled samples are used.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has become one of the most significant tasks in the field of hyperspectral analysis. However, classifying each pixel in HSI accurately is challenging due to the curse of dimensionality and limited training samples. In this paper, we present an HSI classification architecture called camera spectral response network (CSR-Net), which can learn the optimal camera spectral response (CSR) function for HSI classification problems and effectively reduce the spectral dimensions of HSI. Specifically, we design a convolutional layer to simulate the capturing process of cameras, which learns the optimal CSR function for HSI classification. Then, spectral and spatial features are further extracted by spectral and spatial attention modules. On one hand, the learned CSR can be implemented physically and directly used to capture scenes, which makes the image acquisition process more convenient. On the other hand, compared with ordinary HSIs, we only need images with far fewer bands, without sacrificing the classification precision and avoiding the curse of dimensionality. The experimental results of four popular public hyperspectral datasets show that our method, with only a few image bands, outperforms state-of-the-art HSI classification methods which utilize the full spectral bands of images.

Spectral features cannot effectively reflect the differences among the ground objects and distinguish their boundaries in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Multi-scale feature extraction can solve this problem and improve the accuracy of HSI classification. The Gaussian pyramid can effectively decompose HSI into multi-scale structures, and efficiently extract features of different scales by stepwise filtering and downsampling. Therefore, this paper proposed a Gaussian pyramid based multi-scale feature extraction (MSFE) classification method for HSI. First, the HSI is decomposed into several Gaussian pyramids to extract multi-scale features. Second, we construct probability maps in each layer of the Gaussian pyramid and employ edge-preserving filtering (EPF) algorithms to further optimize the details. Finally, the final classification map is acquired by a majority voting method. Compared with other spectral-spatial classification methods, the proposed method can not only extract the characteristics of different scales, but also can better preserve detailed structures and the edge regions of the image. Experiments performed on three real hyperspectral datasets show that the proposed method can achieve competitive classification accuracy.

Abstract. Hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain hundreds of spectral bands, providing high-resolution spectral information pertaining to the Earth’s surface. Additionally, abundant spatial contextual information can also be obtained simultaneously from a HSI. To characterize the properties of ground objects, classification is the most widely-used technology in the field of remote sensing, where each pixel in a HSI is assigned to a pre-defined class. Over the past decade, deep learning has attracted increasing attention in the machine-learning and computer-vision domains, due to its favourable performances for various types of tasks, and it has been successfully introduced to the remote-sensing community. Instead of utilizing the shallow features within in a given image, which is the approach that is generally adopted in other conventional classification methods, deep-learning algorithms can extract hierarchical features from raw HSI data. Within the deep-learning framework, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are able to encode sequential features, have exhibited promising capabilities and have achieved encouraging performances, especially for the natural-language processing and speech-recognition communities. As multi-temporal remote-sensing images can be readily obtained from increasing numbers of satellite and unmanned aircraft systems, and since analysis of such multi-temporal data comprises a critical issue within numerous research subfields, including land-cover and land-change analyses, and land-resource management, RNNs have been applied in recent studies in order to extract temporal sequential features from multi-temporal remote-sensing images for the purpose of image classification. Apart from using multi-temporal image datasets, RNNs can also be utilized on a single image, where the spectral feature/band of each individual pixel can be taken as a sequential feature for the input layer of RNNs. However, the application of such sequential feature extraction that relies on a single image still needs to be further investigated since applying RNNs to spectral bands will directly introduce more parameters that need to be optimized, consequently increasing the total training time.In this study, we propose a novel RNN-based HSI classification framework. In this framework, unlabelled pixels obtained from a single image are considered when constructing sequential features. Two spatial similarity measurements, referred to as pixel-matching and block-matching, respectively, are employed to extract pixels that are “similar” to the target pixel. Then, the sequential feature of the target pixel is constructed by exploiting several of the most “similar” pixels and ordering them based on their similarities to the target pixel. The aforementioned two schemes are advantageous, as unlabelled pixels within the given HSI are taken into consideration for similarity measurement and sequential feature construction for the RNN model. Moreover, the block-matching scheme also takes advantage of spatial contextual information, which has been widely utilized in spatial-spectral-based HSI classification methods. To evaluate the proposed methods, two benchmark HSIs are used, including a HSI collected over Pavia University, Italy by the airborne Reflective Optics System Imaging Spectrometer (ROSIS) sensor, and an image acquired over the Salinas Valley, California, USA via the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor. Spatio-temporally coincident ground-reference data accompanies each of these respective HSIs. In addition, the proposed methods are compared with three state-of-the-art algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), the 1-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN), and the 1-dimensional RNN (1DRNN).Experimental results indicate that our proposed methods achieve markedly better classification performance compared with the baseline algorithms on both datasets. For example, for the Pavia University image, the block-matching based RNN achieves the highest overall classification accuracy, with 94.32% accuracy, which is 9.87% higher than the next most accurate algorithm of the aforementioned three baseline methods, which in this case is the 1DCNN, with 84.45% overall accuracy. More specifically, the block-matching method performs better than the pixel-matching method in terms of both quantitative and qualitative assessments. Based on visual assessment/interpretation of the classification maps, it is apparent that “salt-and-pepper” noise is markedly alleviated; with block-matching, smoother classified images are generated compared with pixel-matching-based methods and the three baseline algorithms. Such results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing spatial contextual information in the similarity measurement.

Traditional hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods mainly include machine learning and convolutional neural network. However, they extremely depend on the large training samples. To obtain high accuracy on limited training samples, we propose a novel end-to-end spectral-spatial multi-scale network (SSMSN) for HSI classification. The SSMSN uses the multi-scale spectral module and the multi-scale spatial module to extract discriminative multi-scale spectral and multi-scale spatial features separately. In the multi-scale spectral module and spatial module, the multi-scale Res2Net block structure can learn multi-scale features at a granular level and increase the range of receptive fields by constructing the hierarchical residual-like connection within one single residual block. To alleviate the overfitting problem and further improve the classification accuracy on limited training samples, we adopt a simple but effective hinge cross-entropy loss function to train the SSMSN at the dynamic learning rate. A large number of experimental results demonstrate that on the Indiana Pines, University of Pavia, Kennedy Space Center, and Salinas Scene data sets, the proposed SSMSN achieves higher classification accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on limited training samples. Meanwhile, our SSMSN obtains less training and testing time than the popular AUSSC method.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is an important technology for hyperspectral data analysis, which has the challenge of high dimensionality and limited training samples. Moreover, due to the spatial continuity of material distribution, it is reasonable to improve the performance of HSI classification from the local similarity viewpoint, i.e., pixels in the same local region have a high probability to share similar features. Therefore, in this paper, a novel method based on local similarity and kernel low-rank representation is proposed to improve the classification accuracy for HSI. First, taking into consideration that pixels in the same homogeneous region share similar spectral features (termed local similarity), the HSI is segmented by the superpixel segmentation algorithm to obtain the homogeneous regions. Then, a model of kernel low-rank representation based on local similarity (KLRRLS) is proposed for HSI classification. In the model of KLRRLS, the nonlinear structure characteristics of HSI are extracted by employing the kernel trick, and the low-rank constraint is used as a prior to restrict the recovery coefficient matrix in each segmentation region, thus efficiently solving the linear non-separable problem and exploiting the contextual information of HSI. Finally, the classification results are generated by fusing the result of each segmented map via the maximum voting mechanism. Experimental results on three real HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the classification accuracy.

In recent studies, superpixel segmentation has been integrated into hyperspectral (HS) image classification methods. However, the existing superpixel-based classification methods usually suffer from two serious problems. First, the accuracy and efficiency of current superpixel segmentation approaches cannot meet the demands of practical applications for HS images; second, conventional superpixel-based classification methods generally consider each generated superpixel as a unit for the image classification, which may help to reduce the computing time but result in a significant decrease of the classification accuracy. To solve the problems, we propose a fast region growing based superpixel segmentation (FRGSS) algorithm and a novel texture-adaptive superpixel integration strategy (TASIS) for the HS image classification. Experimental results on real Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) HS images demonstrate that the proposed FRGSS outperforms the state-of-the-art superpixel algorithm. In addition, the superiority of the TASIS is verified compared to the pixel-wise and the conventional superpixel-based classification methods.

The lack of training samples remains one of the major obstacles in applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In this letter, the accurate classification of HSI with limited training samples is investigated. Due to the advantages of minimizing the distance between samples in the same class and maximizing the distance between samples in different classes, siamese CNN is used for HSI classification with limited training samples. After that, to improve the classification performance, data augmentation is investigated for siamese CNN-based HSI classification. Specifically, pair data augmentation based on CutMix is proposed to generate the training pairs of the same or different classes and the new generated training pairs are used to train siamese CNN. Traditional data augmentation methods simply generate new training samples. It is not proper when data augmentation methods keep the loss function and change the content of the input at the same time. Therefore, a soft-loss-based siamese CNN, which changes its loss according to the coupled replacement data augmentation, is proposed to further address the HSI classification with limited training samples. In the experimental part, on two widely used hyperspectral datasets, the influences of different training samples and window sizes are discussed, and the experimental results reveal that the proposed soft-augmentation-based siamese CNN provides competitive results with limited training samples compared with state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we propose a hyperspectral image (HSI) classification method using spectral-spatial long short term memory (LSTM) networks. Specifically, for each pixel, we feed its spectral values in different channels into Spectral LSTM one by one to learn the spectral feature. Meanwhile, we firstly use principle component analysis (PCA) to extract the first principle component from a HSI, and then select local image patches centered at each pixel from it. After that, we feed the row vectors of each image patch into Spatial LSTM one by one to learn the spatial feature for the center pixel. In the classification stage, the spectral and spatial features of each pixel are fed into softmax classifiers respectively to derive two different results, and a decision fusion strategy is further used to obtain a joint spectral-spatial results. Experiments are conducted on two widely used HSIs, and the results show that our method can achieve higher performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) with its high resolution spatial and spectral information, has important applications in military, aerospace and civil applications. The classification methods have become the focus of the field as a significant research aspect of hyperspectral remote monitor engineering for earth reflexion. Because of its high dimensional nature, high relation between bands and spectral variety, traditional classification methods are difficult to achieve high precision and accuracy which limits the development of HSI classification technology. In the past years, with the fast recrudesce of deep learning engineering, its powerful feature extraction ability can remarkably ameliorate the accuracy of HSI classification, HSI classification on account of deep learning has become a feasibility study hotspot. In this paper, the methods of HSI classification on account of deep learning are reviewed. First, the research background of HSI classification is introduced and the deep neural network models which are expensively used in the field of HSI classification are summarized. On this basis, some HSI classification methods on account of deep learning are introduced in detail. Finally, the breakthrough aspects of deep learning in the map of HSI classification are summarized at the current stage and the future research direction is prospected.

Most hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods assume that all classes in the test set are present during training. However, in real-world applications, acquiring labeled training samples is challenging. As a result, it is difficult for the training dataset to cover all possible land cover types, leading to the generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) problem. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have provided rich semantic priors for land cover classes, offering promising potential for GZSL. However, two fundamental gaps hinder their application to HSI classification: the task paradigm gap, arising from the difference between image-level VLMs and the pixel-level HSI classification task; and the knowledge gap, due to the inconsistency between VLM features and HSI spectral–spatial representations. To bridge both gaps, a novel framework leveraging VLM semantic priors for GZSL in HSI classification is proposed, primarily using pseudo-labeling technique to provide knowledge for unseen classes. Specifically, a pseudo-label generation and enhancement module enables a paradigm transition from image-level understanding to pixel-level classification by incorporating HSI’s spatial information. A pseudo-label correction module then refines noisy labels using spectral cues to address the knowledge gap. Finally, a global learning strategy integrates pseudo-label distillation, supervised learning, and feature regularization to classify seen classes while enabling generalization to unseen ones. Experiments on benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate the proposed method’s superiority in generalized zero-shot classification. This work highlights the potential of VLMs in advancing HSI classification in practical applications.

The conventional method used in forest inventory is time-consuming, especially in field surveying and requires an expert’s knowledge and observation to do species identification. This standard method can be facilitated by advances in remote sensing technology. An airborne hyperspectral image mosaic was utilised in the research to evaluate the ability of this high spectral fidelity dataset that was incorporated into a feature extraction Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to successfully detect and map a tree species of interest (Shorea kunstleri King) within the mixed dipterocarp forest stand of the Lambir Hills National Park. In this study, two types of feature extraction Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Spectral Derivative (SD) were applied to classifiers SVM. To demonstrate the effect, classification of the hyperspectral image with no feature extraction was done. The accuracies achieved from different feature extraction were compared statistically. Based on the results, Shorea kunstleri King was able to be discriminated against within 53 species of Shorea. SVM classifier is known for its ability to generalise well even with limited training samples and is commonly used in image classification. The Kernel parameter in SVM classifier alongside feature extraction significantly affects the classification accuracy. Therefore, feature extraction does affect the classification accuracy, but it depends on the morphology of the study area. It is concluded that the SVM method with SD feature extraction could detect tree crowns of Shorea kunstleri with a Kappa coefficient of 0.8126 which showed a great agreement with the observed samples and overall accuracy of 89.89% that shows the accuracy of the final map.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has many applications in different diverse research fields. We propose a method for HSI classification using principal component analysis (PCA), 2D spatial convolution, and support vector machine (SVM). Our method takes advantage of correlation in both spatial and spectral domains in an HSI data cube at the same time. We use PCA to reduce the dimensionality of an HSI data cube. We then perform spatial convolution to the dimension-reduced data cube once and then to the convolved data cube for the second time. As a result, we have generated two convolved PCA output data cubes in a multiresolution way. We feed the two convolved data cubes to SVM to classify each pixel to one of the known classes. Experiments on three widely used hyperspectral data cubes (i.e., Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas) demonstrate that our method can improve the classification accuracy significantly when compared to a few existing methods. Our method is relatively fast in terms of central processing unit computational time as well.

Deep learning techniques have boosted the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown superior performance to that of the conventional machine learning algorithms. Recently, a novel type of neural networks called capsule networks (CapsNets) was presented to improve the most advanced CNNs. In this paper, we present a modified two-layer CapsNet with limited training samples for HSI classification, which is inspired by the comparability and simplicity of the shallower deep learning models. The presented CapsNet is trained using two real HSI datasets, i.e., the PaviaU (PU) and SalinasA datasets, representing complex and simple datasets, respectively, and which are used to investigate the robustness or representation of every model or classifier. In addition, a comparable paradigm of network architecture design has been proposed for the comparison of CNN and CapsNet. Experiments demonstrate that CapsNet shows better accuracy and convergence behavior for the complex data than the state-of-the-art CNN. For CapsNet using the PU dataset, the Kappa coefficient, overall accuracy, and average accuracy are 0.9456, 95.90%, and 96.27%, respectively, compared to the corresponding values yielded by CNN of 0.9345, 95.11%, and 95.63%. Moreover, we observed that CapsNet has much higher confidence for the predicted probabilities. Subsequently, this finding was analyzed and discussed with probability maps and uncertainty analysis. In terms of the existing literature, CapsNet provides promising results and explicit merits in comparison with CNN and two baseline classifiers, i.e., random forests (RFs) and support vector machines (SVMs).

The fusion of hyperspectral image (HSI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data can provide complementary information and improve the accuracy of land cover classification. In this paper, a novel fusion method is proposed to fuse the HSI and LiDAR dataset based on multi-scale feature extraction and total variation. In the method, the extended multi-attribute profile (EMAP) is utilized to automatically extract structural information from HSI and LiDAR elements. The extracted features are then estimated in a lower-dimensional space by multi-scale total variation (MSTV). Finally, the classification map is generated by applying random forest classifiers on the fused data. In the experiment, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated on an urban dataset of Houston. The results demonstrate that classification accuracy could be significantly improved by the proposed method compared with other methods.