Multimetric Active Learning for Classification of Remote Sensing Data

The classification of hyperspectral and multimodal remote sensing data is affected by two key problems: the high dimensionality of the input data and the limited number of the labeled samples. In this letter, a multimetric learning approach that combines feature extraction and active learning (AL) is introduced to deal with these two issues simultaneously. In particular, distinct metrics are assigned to different types of features and then learned jointly. In this way, multiple features are projected into a common feature space, in which AL is then performed in conjunction with k-nearest neighbor classification to enrich the set of labeled samples. Experiments on two sets of remote sensing data illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of both classification accuracy and computational requirements.