Hyperspectral image classification using Support Vector Machine

Classification of land cover hyperspectral images is a very challenging task due to the unfavourable ratio between the number of spectral bands and the number of training samples. The focus in many applications is to investigate an effective classifier in terms of accuracy. The conventional multiclass classifiers have the ability to map the class of interest but the considerable efforts and large training sets are required to fully describe the classes spectrally. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is suggested in this paper to deal with the multiclass problem of hyperspectral imagery. The attraction to this method is that it locates the optimal hyper plane between the class of interest and the rest of the classes to separate them in a new high-dimensional feature space by taking into account only the training samples that lie on the edge of the class distributions known as support vectors and the use of the kernel functions made the classifier more flexible by making it robust against the outliers. A comparative study has undertaken to find an effective classifier by comparing Support Vector Machine (SVM) to the other two well known classifiers i.e. Maximum likelihood (ML) and Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM). At first, the Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF) was applied to extract the best possible features form the hyperspectral imagery and then the resulting subset of the features was applied to the classifiers. Experimental results illustrate that the integration of MNF and SVM technique significantly reduced the classification complexity and improves the classification accuracy.