Representative Learning via Span-Based Mutual Information for PolSAR Image Classification

The optimal parameters of polarimetric scattering decomposition are critical to classify the pixels in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images by utilizing the method of machine learning. Therefore, span-based mutual information (Sp-MI) is proposed to lighten the dependence on labeling information, and then a heuristic representative learning scheme is also given by artificial neural network (ANN) to classify parameters separately with the increasing sequence according to the values of Sp-MI. Furthermore, an innovative method of using the sine function is presented to map the parameters of angular, and a min-max scaling method is applied to complete the procedure of normalization. Except for the support vector machine, three ANN-based classifiers are implemented to verify the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed representative learning and normalization scheme. Meanwhile, the classification method is compared with four similar comparison methods on three real PolSAR images. Finally, the classification results show the effectiveness of the proposed Sp-MI and the validation of the representative learning scheme in the aspect of classification overall accuracy and visual effect.