Robust Hyperspectral Image Classification by Multi-Layer Spatial-Spectral Sparse Representations

Sparse representation (SR)-driven classifiers have been widely adopted for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, and many algorithms have been presented recently. However, most of the existing methods exploit the single layer hard assignment based on class-wise reconstruction errors on the subspace assumption; moreover, the single-layer SR is biased and less stable due to the high coherence of the training samples. In this paper, motivated by category sparsity, a novel multi-layer spatial-spectral sparse representation (mlSR) framework for HSI classification is proposed. The mlSR assignment framework effectively classifies the test samples based on the adaptive dictionary assembling in a multi-layer manner and intrinsic class-dependent distribution. In the proposed framework, three algorithms, multi-layer SR classification (mlSRC), multi-layer collaborative representation classification (mlCRC) and multi-layer elastic net representation-based classification (mlENRC) for HSI, are developed. All three algorithms can achieve a better SR for the test samples, which benefits HSI classification. Experiments are conducted on three real HSI image datasets. Compared with several state-of-the-art approaches, the increases of overall accuracy (OA), kappa and average accuracy (AA) on the Indian Pines image range from 3.02% to 17.13%, 0.034 to 0.178 and 1.51% to 11.56%, respectively. The improvements in OA, kappa and AA for the University of Pavia are from 1.4% to 21.93%, 0.016 to 0.251 and 0.12% to 22.49%, respectively. Furthermore, the OA, kappa and AA for the Salinas image can be improved from 2.35% to 6.91%, 0.026 to 0.074 and 0.88% to 5.19%, respectively. This demonstrates that the proposed mlSR framework can achieve comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art classification methods.