Recent Advances on Spectral–Spatial Hyperspectral Image Classification: An Overview and New Guidelines

Abstract

Imaging spectroscopy, also known as hyperspectral imaging, has been transformed in the last four decades from being a sparse research tool into a commodity product available to a broad user community. Specially, in the last 10 years, a large number of new techniques able to take into account the special properties of hyperspectral data have been introduced for hyperspectral data processing, where hyperspectral image classification, as one of the most active topics, has drawn massive attentions. Spectral-spatial hyperspectral image classification can achieve better classification performance than its pixel-wise counterpart, since the former utilizes not only the information of spectral signature but also that from spatial domain. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview on the methods belonging to the category of spectral-spatial classification in a relatively unified context. First, we develop a concept of spatial dependency system that involves pixel dependency and label dependency, with two main factors: neighborhood covering and neighborhood importance. In terms of the way that the neighborhood information is used, the spatial dependency systems can be classified into fixed, adaptive, and global systems, which can accommodate various kinds of existing spectral-spatial methods. Based on such, the categorizations of single-dependency, bilayer-dependency, and multiple-dependency systems are further introduced. Second, we categorize the performings of existing spectral-spatial methods into four paradigms according to the different fusion stages wherein spatial information takes effect, i.e., preprocessing-based, integrated, postprocessing-based, and hybrid classifications. Then, typical methodologies are outlined. Finally, several representative spectral-spatial classification methods are applied on real-world hyperspectral data in our experiments.