An Experimental Comparison of Semi-supervised Learning Algorithms for Multispectral Image Classification

Abstract

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) method has recently caught much attention in the fields of machine learning and computer vision owing to its superiority in classifying abundant unlabelled samples using a few labeled samples. The goal of this paper is to provide an experimental efficiency comparison between graph based SSL algorithms and traditional supervised learning algorithms (e.g., support vector machines) for multispectral image classification. This research shows that SSL algorithms generally outperform supervised learning algorithms in both classification accuracy and anti-noise ability. In the experiments carried out on two data sets (hyperspectral image and Landsat image), the mean overall accuracies (OAs) of supervised learning algorithms are 15 percent and 86 percent, while the mean OAS of SSL algorithms are 26 percent and 99 percent. To overcome the polynomial complexity of SSL algorithms, we also developed a linear-complexity algorithm by employing multivariate Taylor Series Expansion (TSE) and Woodbury Formula.