Patch-based active learning (PTAL) for spectral-spatial classification on hyperspectral data

Abstract

Active learning (AL) has been shown to be a useful approach to improving the efficiency of the classification process for remote-sensing imagery. Current AL methods are essentially based on pixel-wise classification. In this paper, a new patch-based active learning (PTAL) framework is proposed for spectral-spatial classification on hyperspectral remote-sensing data. The method consists of two major steps. In the initialization stage, the original hyperspectral images are partitioned into overlapping patches. Then, for each patch, the spectral and spatial information as well as the label are extracted. A small set of patches is randomly selected from the data set for annotation, then a patch-based support vector machine (PTSVM) classifier is initially trained with these patches. In the second stage (close-loop stage of query and retraining), the trained PTSVM classifier is combined with one of three query methods, which are margin sampling (MS), entropy query-by-bagging (EQB), and multi-class level uncertainty (MCLU), and is subsequently employed to query the most informative samples from the candidate pool comprising the rest of the patches from the data set. The query selection cycle enables the PTSVM model to select the most informative queries for human annotation. Then, these informative queries are added to the training set. This process runs iteratively until a stopping criterion is met. Finally, the trained PTSVM is employed to patch classification. In order to compare this to pixel-based active learning (PXAL) models, the prediction label of a patch by PTSVM is transformed into a pixel-wise label of a pixel predictor to get the classification maps. Experimental results show better performance of the proposed PTAL methods on classification accuracy and computational time on three different hyperspectral data sets as compared with PXAL methods.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and valuable comments, which have significantly improved the presentation of the paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. [61273259], [61370036], and [61272223]; and the Six Major Talents Summit of Jiangsu Province under Grant No. [2013-XXRJ-019]. Email: [email protected].