CLASS-BASED AFFINITY PROPAGATION FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION AND IMPROVEMENT OF MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY

Abstract This paper investigates an alternative classification method that integrates class-based affinity propagation (CAP) clustering algorithm and maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) with the purpose of overcome the MLC limitations in the classification of high dimensionality data, and thus improve its accuracy. The new classifier was named CAP-MLC, and comprises two approaches, spectral feature selection and image classification. CAP clustering algorithm was used to perform the image dimensionality reduction and feature selection while the MLC was employed for image classification. The performance of MLC in terms of classification accuracy and processing time is determined as a function of the selection rate achieved in the CAP clustering stage. The performance of CAP-MLC has been evaluated and validated using two hyperspectral scenes from the Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) and the Hyperspectral Digital Imagery Collection Experiment (HYDICE). Classification results show that CAP-MLC observed an enormous improvement in accuracy, reaching 94.15% and 96.47% respectively for AVIRIS and HYDICE if compared with MLC, which had 85.42% and 81.50%. These values obtained by CAP-MLC improved the MLC classification accuracy in 8.73% and 14.97% for these images. The results also show that CAP-MLC performed well, even for classes with limited training samples, surpassing the limitations of MLC.