Spectral-spatial hyperspectral image classification based on superpixel and multi-classifier fusion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hyperspectral image classification is a challenging problem for machine learning methods due to the small number of labelled samples and high spectral variability. In this paper, to solve this problem, a novel superpixel and multi-classifier fusion (SMCF)-based classification method for hyperspectral images is proposed. This method takes full advantage of the spectral information of superpixels and the spatial information of hyperspectral images and includes the following three steps. First, superpixels are used to increase the number of training samples and their spectral diversity. Second, label propagation (LP) is used to classify the hyperspectral images. Although LP is an efficient semi-supervised classification method, the corresponding performance is poor for certain land cover types with dispersed spatial distributions. Thus, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is introduced to classify the hyperspectral images. Finally, the results of the SVM and LP classifiers are combined using our new class-specific weighted fusion algorithm. In the experiments, we selected three widely used and real hyperspectral data sets for evaluation. The final classification performance was evaluated based on two common metrics: the overall accuracy (OA) and the Kappa coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed SMCF method is superior to six well-known classification methods, even when only 1% or less of the labelled samples are used.