A New Semi-Supervised Classification Strategy Combining Active Learning and Spectral Unmixing of Hyperspectral Data

Hyperspectral remote sensing allows for the detailed analysis of the surface of the Earth by providing high-dimensional images with hundreds of spectral bands. Hyperspectral image classification plays a significant role in hyperspectral image analysis and has been a very active research area in the last few years. In the context of hyperspectral image classification, supervised techniques (which have achieved wide acceptance) must address a difficult task due to the unbalance between the high dimensionality of the data and the limited availability of labeled training samples in real analysis scenarios. While the collection of labeled samples is generally difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, unlabeled samples can be generated in a much easier way. Semi-supervised learning offers an effective solution that can take advantage of both unlabeled and a small amount of labeled samples. Spectral unmixing is another widely used technique in hyperspectral image analysis, developed to retrieve pure spectral components and determine their abundance fractions in mixed pixels. In this work, we propose a method to perform semi-supervised hyperspectral image classification by combining the information retrieved with spectral unmixing and classification. Two kinds of samples that are highly mixed in nature are automatically selected, aiming at finding the most informative unlabeled samples. One kind is given by the samples minimizing the distance between the first two most probable classes by calculating the difference between the two highest abundances. Another kind is given by the samples minimizing the distance between the most probable class and the least probable class, obtained by calculating the difference between the highest and lowest abundances. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using a real hyperspectral data set collected by the airborne visible infrared imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS) over the Indian Pines region in Northwestern Indiana. In the paper, techniques for efficient implementation of the considered technique in high performance computing architectures are also discussed.