Classification and spectral unmixing are two very important tasks for hyperspectral data exploitation. Although
many studies exist in both areas, the combined use of both approaches has not been widely explored in the literature.
Since hyperspectral images are generally dominated by mixed pixels, spectral unmixing can particularly
provide a useful source of information for classification purposes. In previous work, we have demonstrated that
spectral unmixing can be used as an effective approach for feature extraction prior to supervised classification
of hyperspectral data using support vector machines (SVMs). Unmixing-based features do not dramatically
improve classification accuracies with regards to features provided by classic techniques such as the minimum
noise fraction (MNF), but they can provide a better characterization of small classes. Also, these features are
potentially easier to interpret due to their physical meaning (in spectral unmixing, the features represent the
abundances of real materials present in the scene). In this paper, we develop a new strategy for feature extraction
prior to supervised classification of hyperspectral images. The proposed method first performs unsupervised
multidimensional clustering on the original hyperspectral image to implicitly include spatial information in the
process. The cluster centres are then used as representative spectral signatures for a subsequent (partial) unmixing
process, and the resulting features are used as inputs to a standard (supervised) classification process.
The proposed strategy is compared to other classic and unmixing feature extraction methods presented in the
literature. Our experiments, conducted with several reference hyperspectral images widely used for classification
purposes, reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Hyperspectral imaging is a continuously growing area of remote sensing. Hyperspectral data provide a wide
spectral range, coupled with a very high spectral resolution, and are suitable for detection and classification of
surfaces and chemical elements in the observed image. The main problem with hyperspectral data for these
applications is the (relatively) low spatial resolution, which can vary from a few to tens of meters. In the
case of classification purposes, the major problem caused by low spatial resolution is related to mixed pixels,
i.e., pixels in the image where more than one land cover class is within the same pixel. In such a case, the
pixel cannot be considered as belonging to just one class, and the assignment of the pixel to a single class
will inevitably lead to a loss of information, no matter what class is chosen. In this paper, a new supervised
technique exploiting the advantages of both probabilistic classifiers and spectral unmixing algorithms is proposed,
in order to produce land cover maps of improved spatial resolution. The method is in three steps. In a first
step, a coarse classification is performed, based on the probabilistic output of a Support Vector Machine (SVM).
Every pixel can be assigned to a class, if the probability value obtained in the classification process is greater
than a chosen threshold, or unclassified. In the proposed approach it is assumed that the pixels with a low
probabilistic output are mixed pixels and thus their classification is addressed in a second step. In the second
step, spectral unmixing is performed on the mixed pixels by considering the preliminary results of the coarse
classification step and applying a Fully Constrained Least Squares (FCLS) method to every unlabeled pixel, in
order to obtain the abundances fractions of each land cover type. Finally, in a third step, spatial regularization
by Simulated Annealing is performed to obtain the resolution improvement. Experiments were carried out on
a real hyperspectral data set. The results are good both visually and numerically and show that the proposed
method clearly outperforms common hard classification methods when the data contain mixed pixels.
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