CREATING MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF HYPERSPECTRAL DATA;FEATURE SELECTION OR FEATURE EXTRACTION

Classification of hyperspectral images is challenging. A very high dimensional input space requires an exponentially large amount of data to adequately and reliably represent the classes in that space. In other words in order to obtain statistically reliable classification results, the number of necessary training samples increases exponentially as the number of spectral bands increases. However, in many situations, acquisition of the large number of training samples for these high-dimensional datasets may not be so easy. This problem can be overcome by using multiple classifiers. In this paper we compared the effectiveness of two approaches for creating multiple classifiers, feature selection and feature extraction. The methods are based on generating multiple feature subsets by running feature selection or feature extraction algorithm several times, each time for discrimination of one of the classes from the rest. A maximum likelihood classifier is applied on each of the obtained feature subsets and finally a combination scheme was used to combine the outputs of individual classifiers. Experimental results show the effectiveness of feature extraction algorithm for generating multiple classifiers.