Ensemble Stacked Auto-encoder Classification on LIDAR Remote Sensing Images

Light detection and ranging system (LIDAR) can obtain diverse remote sensing datasets which contains different land cover information. The datasets offer vital and significant features for land cover classification. As a new and effective deep learning algorithm, stacked auto-encoders (SAE) consists of multiple auto-encoders in which the code of each auto-encoder is the input of the successive one. The classification precision is closely related to hidden layers, and the number of samples in fine-tuning step also affects classification results. In this paper we study the classifiers based on different number of samples and hidden layers. According to appropriate parameters, we promote SAE with adaptive boosting ensemble strategy to build new classification method. Two tests which are based on LIDAR datasets are implemented. The experiment results prove that the fusion of deep learning and ensemble learning is effective to LIDAR remote sensing images. The proposed method is robust to similar scenes classification. The overall accuracy increases 6% compared with bagging method on test 1.