A probabilistic SVM approach for hyperspectral image classification using spectral and texture features

ABSTRACT

New hyperspectral sensors can collect a large number of spectral bands, which provide a capability to distinguish various objects and materials on the earth. However, the accurate classification of these images is still a big challenge. Previous studies demonstrate the effectiveness of combination of spectral data and spatial information for better classification of hyperspectral images. In this article, this approach is followed to propose a novel three-step spectral–spatial method for classification of hyperspectral images. In the first step, Gabor filters are applied for texture feature extraction. In the second step, spectral and texture features are separately classified by a probabilistic Support Vector Machine (SVM) pixel-wise classifier to estimate per-pixel probability. Therefore, two probabilities are obtained for each pixel of the image. In the third step, the total probability is calculated by a linear combination of the previous probabilities on which a control parameter determines the efficacy of each one. As a result, one pixel is assigned to one class which has the highest total probability. This method is performed in multivariate analysis framework (MAF) on which one pixel is represented by a d-dimensional vector, d is the number of spectral or texture features, and in functional data analysis (FDA) on which one pixel is considered as a continuous function. The proposed method is evaluated with different training samples on two hyperspectral data. The combination parameter is experimentally obtained for each hyperspectral data set as well as for each training samples. This parameter adjusts the efficacy of the spectral versus texture information in various areas such as forest, agricultural or urban area to get the best classification accuracy. Experimental results show high performance of the proposed method for hyperspectral image classification. In addition, these results confirm that the proposed method achieves better results in FDA than in MAF. Comparison with some state-of-the-art spectral–spatial classification methods demonstrates that the proposed method can significantly improve classification accuracies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.