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Hyperspectral image classification based on KNN

sparse representation

Conference Paper · July 2016

DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS.2016.7729622

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 HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION BASED ON KNN SPARSE
REPRESENTATION
Weiwei Song, Shutao Li, Xudong Kang, and Kunshan Huang
College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China
ABSTRACT
Traditional joint sparse representation based hyperspectral
classification methods define a local region for each pix-
el. Through representing the pixels within the local region
simultaneously, the class of the central pixel is able to be
decided. A common limitation of this kind of methods is that
only local pixels are considered in such methods, and thus,
non-local information will be ignored. In order to improve the
classification accuracy with the non-local information of hy-
perspectral images, a novel hyperspectral image classification
based on K nearest neighbors (KNN) sparse representation
is proposed in this paper. First, a feature space is defined
based on the first principal components of the hyperspectral
image and the spatial coordinates of different pixels. Then,
in the defined feature space, K non-local neighborhoods of
each pixel are found by using the KNN searching scheme.
At last, through jointly representing the K pixels with the
joint sparse model and comparing the representation residu-
als, the label of each pixel can be determined. Experiments
performed on a widely used real HSI data set show that the
proposed method obtain better classification performances
when compared with the traditional joint sparse representa-
tion method and other recently proposed hyperspectral image
classification methods.
Index Terms— Classification, hyperspectral images, K
Nearest Neighbor(KNN), joint sparse representation.
1. INTRODUCTION
Hyperspectral images (HSI) contain hundreds of spectral
bands spanning from the visible to the infrared spectrum.
Each pixel in a HSI can be represented by a vector whose
entries correspond to the spectral reflectance in a specific
wavelength. With the rich spectral information of HSI, an
accurate classification of different materials becomes pos-
sible. Due to this advantage, HSI remote sensing has been
This paper is supported by the National Natural Science Fund of Chi-
na for Distinguished Young Scholars (No. 61325007), the National Natural
Science Fund of China for International Cooperation and Exchanges (No.
61520106001), the Science and Technology Plan Projects Fund of Hunan
Province (No. 2015WK3001), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities, Hunan
978-1-5090-3332-4/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 2411
widely used in many applications such as monitoring of the
environment and disasters.
To achieve the objective of HSI classification, assigning
pixels to one specific class based on their spectral characteris-
tics, various spectral classifiers have been developed such as
neural networks [1], genetic algorithm [2], and support vec-
tor machines(SVMs) [3]. In recent years, as a novel signal
representation tool, sparse representation has been success-
fully applied for HSI classification [4]. This method assumes
that each hyperspectral pixel and its neighbor pixels within a
local window can be simultaneously represented by a set of
atoms in a dictionary composed of training samples. In other
words, pixels which has strong spatial correlations tend to be
classified into the same class in this situation. Compared to
the pixel-wise based classification methods, the joint sparse
representation (JSR) not only considers the spectral charac-
teristic of each pixel but also its spatial neighbors, and thus,
can obtain a better classification performance. However, it is
hard to decide the optimal window sizes for different scenes.
For example, a window of small size is appropriate for pixels
near edges, while pixels in smooth areas prefer large windows
for accurate classification. To solve these drawbacks, a multi-
scale sparse representation scheme called the multiscale adap-
tive sparse representation (MASR) is proposed in [5] to take
the advantages of different window sizes for classification.
Compared with the JSR method, this model achieves obvious
improvements in terms of classification accuracy. However,
this model will be quite time-consuming due to the multi-
scale representation process. More importantly, a common
limitation of this kind of methods is that only local pixels are
considered for these methods, and thus, non-local information
will be ignored.
To make full use of the non-local information of hyper-
spectral images, a KNN based filtering is proposed in [6]
which has been demonstrated to be quite effective for the
post-processing of classification results. Different from [6], a
novel K Nearest Neighbors based sparse representation mod-
el is proposed in this paper. First, a feature space is defined
based on the principal components and spatial coordinates of
the hyperspectral pixels. Then, through performing globally
searching in the designed feature space, K most similar pix-
els for each pixel of HSI are found. Finally, the K pixels
IGARSS 2016
are simultaneously represented with the joint sparse model to
determine the label of each pixel in HSI.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, the sparse representation for classification is intro-
duced briefly and a novel sparsity model is proposed. In Sec-
tion 3, experimental results on a real HSI data set are present-
ed, and the superiority of the proposed method is demonstrat-
ed by comparing it with other classification methods. Finally,
conclusions are given in Section 4.
2. SPARSITY MODEL FOR CLASSIFICATION
2.1. Pixelwise Sparsity Model
HSI classification based sparse representation relies on an
observation that spectral pixels belonging to same class
are assumed to lie in a low-dimensional subspace, which
is spanned by dictionary atoms from all common class
training samples. For an unknown pixel, it can be rep-
resented as a linear combination of all training samples.
Specifically, let xi ∈ Rd×1 be a d-dimensional vector and
D = {D1 , ..., Dn , ..., DN } ∈ RN ×d is structural dictionary,
where Dn is the nth sub-dictionary spanned by all the nth
training samples and N is number of class. Then xi can be
represented as
xi = Ds (1)
where s is sparse vector whose nonzero entries refer to those
selected representing atoms. In other words,the positions and
weights of representing training samples can be obtained from
sparse vector s. Given structural dictionary D, the sparse vec-
tor s can be recovered by solving the following optimization
problem:
ŝ = arg minkxi − Dsk2 , s.t. ksk0 ≤ β (2)
where β is a predefined upper bound on sparsity level corre-
sponding to the number of nonzero entries in sparse vector.
Once the sparse vector is obtained, the nth residual error be-
tween test samples and reconstructed samples can be repre-
sented as
rn (xi ) = kxi − Dn sn k2 , n = 1, 2, ..., N (3)
where Dn refers to the sub-dictionary constructed by the
training samples belonging to the nth class. Then the class
label of xi can be determined by minimizing the residual
error
Class(xi ) = arg min rn (xi ) (4)
n=1,2,...,N
2.2. Joint Sparsity Model
In HSI, pixels are highly correlated with each other, and it has
become a common sense that incorporating spatial informa-
tion can enhance classification performances. To exploit the
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spatial information in sparse representation model,the joint s-
parse representation model is proposed in [4]. It assumes that
neighboring pixels within a fix region can be simultaneously
represented by a few common atoms from the structural dic-
tionary. Concretely, in a W × W square window centered
on xi , let X = [xi1 , xi2 , ..., xiW ×W ] ∈ Rd×(W ×W ) is a
d × (W × W ) matrix. Then, these pixels can be compact-
ly represented as
X = [xi1 , xi2 , ..., xiW ×W ] = [Ds1 , Ds2 , ..., DsW ×W ]
(5)
= D[s1 , s2 , ..., sW × W ] = DS
where S is a sparse matrix, in which the nonzero rows are cor-
responding to the selected atoms (or training samples) from
structural dictionary. Given the dictionary D, the sparse ma-
trix can be recovered by solving the following optimization
problem
Ŝ = arg minkX − DSkF , s.t. kSkrow,0 ≤ β (6)
Once the sparse matrix is obtained, the residual error can be
calculated, and finally, class label of centered pixel can be
determined as follows:
rn (X) = kX − Dn Sn k2 , n = 1, 2, ..., N (7)
Class(X) = arg min rn (X) (8)
n=1,2,...,N
2.3. The Proposed Model
Although the JSR method can improve the classification per-
formance significantly in terms of accuracy, it only exploits
correlation of local pixels, and the non-local pixels are not
considered. To make full use of the nonlocal spatial infor-
mation of HSI pixels, a novel method called as K Nearest
Neighbor sparse representation (KNNSR) is proposed in this
paper. Compared with JSR, the KNNSR overcomes locality
of JSRM and non-locally searches the similar pixels with the
centered pixel. Beside, it also avoids to decide the optimized
size of window, which is not a trivial matters in some practice
cases.
The main procedures of KNNSR can be described as fol-
lows: Firstly, the HSI is preprocessed by principal compo-
nents analysis (PCA), subsequently, a new feature space is
defined based on the obtained principal components and s-
patial coordinates of the hyperspectral pixels. Then, through
performing globally searching in the designed feature space,
K most similar pixels for each pixel of HSI are found by using
KNN algorithm 1 . Finally, the K similar pixels are simultane-
ously represented with the joint sparse representation model.
The pseudocode of the KNNSR algorithm is illustrated in Al-
gorithm 1.
1 http://www.vlfeat.org/
Algorithm 1 KNNSR iment to evaluate the classification performance of different
Input: methods. OA measures the percentage of correctly classified
A set of labels, L = {1, ..., N }, in which n ∈ L refer to pixels, AA refers to means of percentage of correctly clas-
the nth class; sified pixels for each class, Kappa coefficient represents the
The hyperspectral image, x = (x1 , ..., xi ) ∈ Rd×i , in robust measure of the degree of agreement.
which each pixel is a d-dimensional pixel vector;
τ Training samples, Tτ ≡ {(x1 , c1 ), ..., (xτ , cτ )} ∈ 3.3. Contrast Experimental Results
(Rd × L)τ ;
1: Performing principal component analysis on the hyper- In this section, the proposed method is compared with the
spectral image to obtain the first s principal components edge-preserving filtering (EPF) method [7], the extended
p = (p1 , ..., pi ) ∈ Rs×i , in which each pixel is a s- morphological profiles (EMP) method [8], the logistic regres-
dimensional vector sion and multilevel logistic (LMLL) method [9], and the joint
2: Construct F = sparse representation (JSR) method [4]. All of the previous
 √ the feature space
methods are implemented with the default parameters settings
p; [a; b]/ A × A + B × B × γ, in which a and
b refer to the vertical and horizontal coordinates of given by the authors.
different pixels, A and B refer to the height and width Fig.1 and Table 1 show the classification results and clas-
of the image, γ controls the balance of the spectral and sification accuracies obtained by different methods (1034
spatial components in the feature space training samples are selected as training samples, and the
3: Performing KNN searching in the feature space to ob- experiments have been repeated ten times to obtain the accu-
tain K nearest neighbors of each pixel i, wi = racies in the table). It can be seen that the proposed method
 1 the give the best performance in terms of overall accuracy, aver-
xi , x2i , ..., xK
i
4: Construct the dictionary D = {x1 , ..., xτ } with the τ age accuracy, and Kappa coefficients.
labeled training samples.
5: Calculating the sparse matrix S with SOMP, i.e., Table 1. Class accuracies (CA), overall accuracies (OA), av-
arg minS kw − DSkF , s.t. kSkrow,0 ≤ β, in which β erage accuracies (AA), and Kappa coefficients (Kappa) of the
refers to the sparse degree SVM [3], EPF [7], EMP [8], LMLL [9], JSR [4] and the pro-
6: Classify each pixel by minimizing the residuals be- posed classification methods
tween the test samples and the reconstructed samples,
Class SVM EPF EMP LMLL JSR KNN-SR
Class(xi ) = arg minn rn (xi ), in which rn (xi ) =
1 66.18 98.67 92.71 49.25 94.39 99.52
kwi − Dn Sn k, Dn refers to the sub-dictionary con-
2 72.84 94.04 89.39 92.90 93.92 96.68
structed by the training samples belonging to the nth class 3 73.09 96.89 83.99 90.20 92.30 96.91
7: end 4 56.27 95.78 81.79 89.06 92.96 96.26
5 88.88 97.74 90.78 91.78 92.08 97.98
6 88.38 94.32 95.84 99.68 94.67 98.42
7 78.86 100 88.00 75.20 96.36 91.61
3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 8 95.48 99.07 99.61 99.88 99.79 99.88
9 40.95 40 78.24 26.67 58.01 97.34
3.1. Data Set 10 74.92 92.88 90.63 88.11 93.46 95.71
11 78.58 90.09 92.91 95.22 97.01 97.83
To verify the superiority of the proposed method, several 12 81.14 97.13 87.83 94.61 92.80 96.99
contrast experiments are conducted on the Indian Pines data 13 91.25 99.95 97.45 99.40 90.84 98.82
14 93.09 95.18 99.43 97.88 97.79 99.68
set which is a widely-used Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging 15 70.05 92.58 97.99 81.75 98.07 98.78
Spectrometer (AVIRIS) image. This data set took place over 16 98.99 96.75 98.66 72.77 80.91 99.64
the agricultural Indian Pine test site in Northwestern Indiana OA 80.46 93.91 92.36 93.32 94.97 97.73
and has 220 spectral channels whose spectral range from 0.2 AA 78.06 92.57 91.58 84.02 94.26 97.42
kappa 77.66 93.02 91.28 92.37 91.58 97.63
µm to 2.4 µm. It is of size 145×145 pixels, with a spatial res-
olution 20m per pixel. In this experiment, twelve very noisy
bands are removed and the remaining 200 spectral channels
are used for classification. A three-band false color image 4. CONCLUSIONS
and the reference data which contains 16 classes of interest
are presented in Fig. 1 (a) and (b). In this paper, a novel HSI classification mathod based on K
nearest neighbor and joint sparse representation is proposed.
3.2. Quantitative Metrics Different from previous works, this method makes full use of
the non-local spatial information of hyperspectral images for
Three metrics (overall accuracy (OA), average accuracy classification. In this algorithm, in the first place, the dimen-
(AA), and the Kappa coefficient) are adopted in this exper- sion of HSI data is reduced by PCA algorithms, subsequent-

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 (a) Indian Pines (b) Color composite (c) SVM(OA=79.95%) (d) EPF(OA=93.76%)

(e) EMP(OA=91.71%) (f) LMLL(OA=92.97%) (g) JSR(OA=94.81%) (h) KNNJSR(OA=97.73%)

Fig. 1. Indian Pines data set. (a) Color composite. (b) Classification results obtained by the SVM [3] (c), EPF [7] (d), EMP [8]
(e), LMLL [9] (f), JSR [4] (g), and KNNSR methods (h) on the Indian Pines data set.

ly, a new feature space is defined based on the first princi-
pal component of the HSI and the spatial coordinate of each
pixel. Then, in the defined feature space, K non-local neigh-
borhoods of each pixel are found by using the KNN search-
ing scheme. At last, through jointly representing the K pixels
with the joint sparse model and comparing the representation
residuals, the label of each pixel can be determined. Exper-
iments performed on a widely used real hyperspectral data
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method com-
pered with other local joint sparse representation methods and
some classical classification methods.
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