PolSAR image classification via multimodal sparse representation-based feature fusion

ABSTRACT It is well known that various features extraction approaches are utilized in polarimetric synthetic aperture (PolSAR) terrain classification for representing the data characteristic. It needs relevant and effective feature fusion algorithms to process complicated features. To address this issue, this article presents a multimodal sparse representation (MSR) framework based algorithm to fuse the different feature vectors from the complicated data space. Polarimetric data features, decomposition features, and the texture features from Pauli colour-coded image are selected to represent multimodal data in different observation modes. The corresponding multimodal manifold regularizations are added to MSR framework to approximate the data structure. Considering the independence and correlation of features, the intrinsic affinity matrices are calculated from this framework. They are processed via local preserve projection algorithm to project the multimodal features into a low dimensionally intrinsic feature space for subsequent classification. Three datasets are utilized in experiments, Western Xi’an, Flevoland, and San Francisco Bay datasets from the Radarsat-2 system in C-band. The effect of regularization parameters and different dimensional fused features are analysed in visualization and quantitation performance. The experiment results demonstrate that the effectiveness and validity of proposed method are superior to other state-of-art methods.