Efficient Multiple Feature Fusion With Hashing for Hyperspectral Imagery Classification: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Due to the complementary properties of different features, multiple feature fusion has a large potential for hyperspectral imagery classification. At the meantime, hashing is promising in representing a high-dimensional float-type feature with extremely low bit binary codes while maintaining the performance. In this paper, we study the possibility of using hashing to fuse multiple features for hyperspectral imagery classification. For this purpose, we propose a multiple feature fusion framework to evaluate the performance of using different hashing methods. For comparison and completeness, we also have an extensive comparison to five subspace-based dimension reduction methods and six fusion-based methods which are popular solutions to deal with multiple features in hyperspectral image classification. Experimental results on four benchmark hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that using hashing to fuse multiple features can achieve comparable or better performance with the traditional subspace-based dimension reduction methods and fusion-based methods. Moreover, the binary features obtained by using hashing need much less storage and are faster to compute distances with the help of machine instructions.