Hyperspectral Image Analysis by Spectral–Spatial Processing and Anticipative Hybrid Extreme Rotation Forest Classification

Recent classification-oriented proposals to thematic maps building from hyperspectral images have used both semisupervised approaches and spatial information for correction of spectral classification. Semisupervised approaches enrich the training data set adding similar samples to each class, whereas spatial correction is based on the natural assumption of thematic class spatial compactness. In this paper, we propose and validate the following innovations: 1) a new spectral classifier, which is called anticipative hybrid extreme rotation forest (AHERF); 2) a spatial-spectral semisupervised approach; and 3) a final spatial classification correction step. The novel heterogeneous ensemble learning approach AHERF starts with a model selection phase, using a small subsample of the training data, in order to define a ranking-based selection probability distribution of the classifier architectures that will be used in the ensemble, so that the architecture best adapted to the data domain will be used more frequently to train individual classifiers in the ensemble. After this initial phase, AHERF trains a heterogeneous ensemble applying random rotations to bootstrapped samples of the remaining training data, aiming to obtain diversified and data-domain adapted individual classifiers. The natural assumption that spatially close pixels will most likely have highly correlated values is exploited in two phases of the process pipeline. First, semisupervised label assignment is supported by spectral similarity and spatial proximity. Unsupervised spectral similarity is detected by latent class discovery. In this paper, we use a clustering algorithm (i.e., k-means). Second, maximizing class spatial compactness removes classification errors that appear as speckle noise in the classification image. The whole approach aims to use minimal sets of labeled pixels for training, which we call the seed training data set. Testing results are computed over the entire image ground truth. For comparison, we provide results in several steps: 1) of classification by AHERF and competing classifiers built by semisupervised training and 2) after spatial correction. We validate the approach on several conventional benchmarking images, achieving results which are comparable with state-of-the-art approaches.