Novel Adaptive Region Spectral–Spatial Features for Land Cover Classification With High Spatial Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery

Abstract

Spectral-spatial features are important for ground target identification and classification with High Spatial Resolution Remotely Sensed (HSRRS) Imagery. In this paper, two novel features, named the Gaussian-Weighting Spectral (GWS) feature and the Area Shape Index (ASI) feature, are proposed to complement the deficiency of the basic image feature for land cover classification with HSRRS imagery. The proposed GWS feature is an adaptive region-based feature that aims to improve the spectral homogeneity of a local area surrounding a pixel. Additionally, it is well known that the spectral feature is inadequate for classifying HSRRS imagery. Therefore, one spatial feature called the ASI feature is proposed here to describe the relationship between the area and shape for an adaptive region around each pixel. The proposed GWS and ASI features coupled with the basic red-green-blue feature are fed into a supervised classifier to obtain the final classification map. Experiments based on four real HSRRS images demonstrate that the proposed GWS and ASI features are capable of improving classification accuracies compared with some cognate state of the art methods. Moreover, the experiments also reveal that the proposed spectral-spatial features can complement each other for enhancing the classification performance with HSRRS images.