Collaborative Representation-Based Multiscale Superpixel Fusion for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In virtue of the spatial structural characteristic of surface materials, the performance of the hyperspectral image classification can be boosted by incorporating texture information. Normally, the spatial structure can be extracted by predefined operators, including the popular extended multiattribute profiles (EMAPs) and the Gabor filters. Recently, superpixel segmentation, which reflects the homogeneous regularity of objects, has drawn much attention in the field. In this paper, a collaborative representation-based multiscale superpixel fusion (CRMSF) approach has been proposed for the hyperspectral image classification. First, after obtaining the EMAPs from the raw hyperspectral image, a group of predesigned 3-D Gabor wavelet filters is convolved with the EMAP features, and the EMAP-Gabor features can, thus, be achieved. Second, the collaborative representation-based classification (CRC) is employed to fully and efficiently make use of the huge amount of extracted EMAP-Gabor features. Third, multiscale superpixel maps are generated from the EMAP features that are utilized to regularize the classification map obtained by CRC. A heuristic strategy has been specially devised to automatically decide the number of extracted superpixels in multiple scales, which can be perfectly compatible with hyperspectral images having various spatial sizes and spatial resolutions. This is the most important contribution of the developed CRMSF approach. Finally, the classification task is accomplished by fusing the multiple regularized classification maps. The CRMSF approach has been evaluated on four popular hyperspectral image data sets, and the experimental results show the advantages of CRMSF, particularly for a hyperspectral image with high spatial resolution.