A Fuzzy-Statistics-Based Affinity Propagation Technique for Clustering in Multispectral Images

Abstract

Due to a high number of spectral channels and a large information quantity, multispectral remote-sensing images are difficult to be classified with high accuracy and efficiency by conventional classification methods, particularly when training data are not available and when unsupervised clustering techniques should be considered for data analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel image clustering method [called fuzzy-statistics-based affinity propagation (FS-AP)] which is based on a fuzzy statistical similarity measure (FSS) to extract land-cover information in multispectral imagery. AP is a clustering algorithm proposed recently in the literature, which exhibits a fast execution speed and finds clusters with small error, particularly for large datasets. FSS can get objective estimates of how closely two pixel vectors resemble each other. The proposed method simultaneously considers all data points to be equally suitable as initial exemplars, thus reducing the dependence of the final clustering from the initialization. Results obtained on three kinds of multispectral images (Landsat-7 ETM+, Quickbird, and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) by comparing the proposed technique with K-means, fuzzy K-means, and AP based on Euclidean distance (ED-AP) demonstrate the good efficiency and high accuracy of FS-AP.