Hyperspectral Image Classification Using Joint Sparse Model and Discontinuity Preserving Relaxation

As a promising signal processing technique, a joint sparse model (JSM) has been used to integrate spatial and spectral information in the classification of remotely sensed images. This technique defines a local region of a fixed window size and assumes an equal contribution from each neighborhood pixel in the classification process of the test pixel. However, equal weighting is less reasonable for heterogeneous pixels, especially around class boundaries. Hence, a discontinuity preserving relaxation (DPR) method can be used to locally smooth the results without crossing the boundaries by detecting the discontinuities of an image in advance. In this letter, we developed a novel strategy that combines these two methods to improve the hyperspectral image classification. A JSM is first applied to obtain a posteriori probability distribution of pixels and then a DPR method is used to further improve the classification results. Experiments conducted on two benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed method leads to superior performance when compared with several popular algorithms.