Classification of visible and infrared hyperspectral images based on image segmentation and edge-preserving filtering

Abstract The classification of hyperspectral images with a few labeled samples is a major challenge which is difficult to meet unless some spatial characteristics can be exploited. In this study, we proposed a novel spectral-spatial hyperspectral image classification method that exploited spatial autocorrelation of hyperspectral images. First, image segmentation is performed on the hyperspectral image to assign each pixel to a homogeneous region. Second, the visible and infrared bands of hyperspectral image are partitioned into multiple subsets of adjacent bands, and each subset is merged into one band. Recursive edge-preserving filtering is performed on each merged band which utilizes the spectral information of neighborhood pixels. Third, the resulting spectral and spatial feature band set is classified using the SVM classifier. Finally, bilateral filtering is performed to remove “salt-and-pepper” noise in the classification result. To preserve the spatial structure of hyperspectral image, edge-preserving filtering is applied independently before and after the classification process. Experimental results on different hyperspectral images prove that the proposed spectral-spatial classification approach is robust and offers more classification accuracy than state-of-the-art methods when the number of labeled samples is small.