Distance Transform-Based Spectral-Spatial Feature Vector for Hyperspectral Image Classification with Stacked Autoencoder.

Pixel-wise classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs) from remote sensing data is a common approach for extracting information about scenes. In recent years, approaches based on deep learning techniques have gained wide applicability. An HSI dataset can be viewed either as a collection of images, each one captured at a different wavelength, or as a collection of spectra, each one associated with a specific point (pixel). Enhanced classification accuracy is enabled if the spectral and spatial information are combined in the input vector. This allows simultaneous classification according to spectral type but also according to geometric relationships. In this study, we proposed a novel spatial feature vector which improves accuracies in pixel-wise classification. Our proposed feature vector is based on the distance transform of the pixels with respect to the dominant edges in the input HSI. In other words, we allow the location of pixels within geometric subdivisions of the dataset to modify the contribution of each pixel to the spatial feature vector. Moreover, we used the extended multi attribute profile (EMAP) features to add more geometric features to the proposed spatial feature vector. We have performed experiments with three hyperspectral datasets. In addition to the Salinas and University of Pavia datasets, which are commonly used in HSI research, we include samples from our Surrey BC dataset. Our proposed method results compares favorably to traditional algorithms as well as to some recently published deep learning-based algorithms.