Spectral–Spatial Prototype Learning-Based Nearest Neighbor Classifier for Hyperspectral Images

Abstract

Due to the Hughes phenomenon, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification under small sample size situation is still a key challenging problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel spectral–spatial prototype learning-based nearest neighbor classifier (SSPLNN) for HSI in this article. The local spectral–spatial neighbor set is first constructed for each sample based on both spectral similarity and spatial structural context to accurately explore the local spectral–spatial information. Then, a spectral–spatial prototype learning model is designed to learn a set of spectral–spatial prototypes, which can optimally utilize both the similarity and variance of samples within each spectral–spatial set and excavate the unseen spectral–spatial variations. The learned spectral–spatial prototypes offer more complementary information to improve the classification accuracy remarkably under small sample size situation. In addition, a linear discriminative projection is simultaneously learned to make each test local spectral–spatial set to be optimally classified to the same class with its nearest neighbor (NN) spectral–spatial prototype set in the projected target subspace. Finally, the NN classifier based on measuring the minimum geometric distance between the projected test spectral–spatial set and the projected spectral–spatial prototype sets is employed to determine the label. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SSPLNN method outperforms several well-known classification methods by a large margin on three widely analyzed HSI datasets.