Support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful cognitive and learning algorithm in the domain of pattern recognition and image classification. However, the generalization ability of SVM is limited when processing classification of high-resolution remote sensing images. One chief reason for this is that the Euclidean distance-based distance matrix in traditional SVM treats different samples equally and overlooks the global distribution of samples. To construct a more effective SVM-based classification method, this paper proposes a multi-scale Mahalanobis kernel-based SVM classifier. In this new method, we first introduce a Mahalanobis distance kernel to improve the global cognitive learning ability of SVM. Then, the Mahalanobis distance kernel is embedded to the multi-scale kernel learning (MSKL) to construct a novel multi-scale Mahalanobis kernel, in which the parameters are optimized by a bio-inspired algorithm, named differential evolution. Finally, the new method is extended to the classification of high-resolution remote sensing images based on the spatial-spectral features. The comparison experiments of five public UCI datasets and two high-resolution remote sensing images verify that the Mahalanobis distance-based method can obtain more accurate classification results than that of the Euclidean distance-based method. In addition, the proposed method produced the best classification results in all the experiments. The global cognitive learning ability of Mahalanobis distance-based method is stronger than that of the Euclidean distance-based method. In addition, this study indicates that the optimized MSKL are potential for the interpretation and understanding of complicated high-resolution remote sensing scene.
