Local Binary Ensemble based Self-training for Semi-supervised Classification of Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Supervised classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images is still challenging due to the scarcity of enough labelled samples. Semi-supervised methods have been adopted to handle this issue. Self-training is a popular semi-supervised technique which is widely used for training a classifier with limited labelled data and a large quantity of unlabeled data. However, traditional self-training approaches often give poor classification results in high dimensional data. In the current work, a novel efficient self-training approach for handling the deficiency of labelled samples for semi-supervised classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images is proposed. The proposed method first trains an ensemble of locally specialized supervised binary classifiers independently by using the dimensionally reduced spectral feature vectors of few available labelled samples. The trained local binary classifiers are then used to extend the labelled set by iterative addition of highly informative unlabeled samples to it by exploiting both the spectral and spatial information of the hyperspectral image. The classifiers are then retrained with the extended dataset in a batchwise manner and the procedure is repeated until adequate quantity of labelled samples are generated. Finally, a supervised multiclass classifier is trained on the extended dataset to produce the final classification map. Experimental results on two benchmark hyperspectral image datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method over supervised and traditional self-training based semi-supervised pixelwise classification approach in terms of different classification measures.