A Method of Particle Swarm Optimized SVM Hyper-spectral Remote Sensing Image Classification

Abstract

Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been proved to be suitable for classification of remote sensing image and proposed to overcome the Hughes phenomenon. Hyper-spectral sensors are intrinsically designed to discriminate among a broad range of land cover classes which may lead to high computational time in SVM mutil-class algorithms. Model selection for SVM involving kernel and the margin parameter values selection which is usually time-consuming, impacts training efficiency of SVM model and final classification accuracies of SVM hyper-spectral remote sensing image classifier greatly. Firstly, based on combinatorial optimization theory and cross-validation method, particle swarm algorithm is introduced to the optimal selection of SVM (PSSVM) kernel parameter σ and margin parameter C to improve the modelling efficiency of SVM model. Then an experiment of classifying AVIRIS in India Pine site of USA was performed for evaluating the novel PSSVM, as well as traditional SVM classifier with general Grid-Search cross-validation method (GSSVM). And then, evaluation indexes including SVM model training time, classification Overall Accuracy (OA) and Kappa index of both PSSVM and GSSVM are all analyzed quantitatively. It is demonstrated that OA of PSSVM on test samples and whole image are 85% and 82%, the differences with that of GSSVM are both within 0.08% respectively. And Kappa indexes reach 0.82 and 0.77, the differences with that of GSSVM are both within 0.001. While the modelling time of PSSVM can be only 1/10 of that of GSSVM, and the modelling. Therefore, PSSVM is an fast and accurate algorithm for hyper-spectral image classification and is superior to GSSVM.