Multiscale Superpixelwise Locality Preserving Projection for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Manifold learning is a powerful dimensionality reduction tool for a hyperspectral image (HSI) classification to relieve the curse of dimensionality and to reveal the intrinsic low-dimensional manifold. However, a specific characteristic of HSIs, i.e., irregular spatial dependency, is not taken into consideration in the method design, which can yield many spatially homogenous subregions in an HSI scence. Conventional manifold learning methods, such as a locality preserving projection (LPP), pursue a unified projection on the entire HSI, while neglecting the local homogeneities on the HSI manifold caused by those spatially homogenous subregions. In this work, we propose a novel multiscale superpixelwise LPP (MSuperLPP) for HSI classification to overcome the challenge. First, we partition an HSI into homogeneous subregions with a multiscale superpixel segmentation. Then, on each scale, subregion specific LPPs and the associated preliminary classifications are performed. Finally, we aggregate the classification results from all scales using a decision fusion strategy to achieve the final result. Experimental results on three real hyperspectral data sets validate the effectiveness of our method.