Superpixel-Based Brownian Descriptor for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Exploring effective spectral & x2013;spatial feature extraction methods is one of the most focused problems in current hyperspectral image (HSI) classification research. However, complex spectral & x2013;spatial structure characteristics in HSIs, e.g., shape-variable spatial structure and nonlinear spectral structure, are difficult to be effectively extracted and jointly represented. To overcome this issue, a novel superpixel-based Brownian descriptor (SBD) method for HSI classification is proposed in this article. In specific, superpixel segmentation is first used to extract shape-adaptive spatial structure information from dimension-reduced HSI, leading to generate nonoverlapping homogeneous 3-D image blocks. Then, similar pixels within the 3-D image block are jointly represented by a new local spectral & x2013;spatial feature based on the Brownian descriptor (BD). This is the first time that the BD is introduced to measure both linear and nonlinear correlations among different spectral bands in HSI. On one hand, the integration of superpixel and BD helps to provide much richer and more valuable information for better discrimination between different categories. On the other hand, the SBD can effectively represent the internal structure characters within each 3-D image block of different spatial shapes by a symmetric positive definite matrix of a united form. Finally, considering that the SBD lies on the Riemannian manifold space, a log-Euclidean kernel sparse representation (LKSR) classifier is introduced to obtain the classification results. Experimental results on three widely used real hyperspectral datasets indicate the performance superiority of the proposed SBD method over several state-of-the-art techniques.