Feature-Driven Active Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Active learning (AL) has obtained a great success in supervised remotely sensed hyperspectral image classification, since it is able to select highly informative training samples. As an intrinsically biased sampling approach, AL generally favors the selection of samples following discriminative distributions, which are located in low-density areas. However, hyperspectral data are often highly class-mixed, i.e., most samples fluctuate in the overlapping regions of distributions of different classes. In this case, the potential of AL to select effective training samples is more limited. As AL strongly depends on the features, a possibility to increase its capabilities is to transfer the data into a highly discriminative feature space, in which the mixture of distributions that different classes of data follow tends to reduce. Based on this observation, in this paper, we introduce the concept of feature-driven AL, namely, the sample selection is going to be conducted in a given optimized feature space whose superiority is measured by an overall error probability. For illustrative purposes, we used Gabor filtering and morphological profiles for instantiation. Our experimental results, obtained on three real hyperspectral data sets, indicate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the potential of AL for hyperspectral image classification.