AN APPROACH TO THE TRAINING OF A SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE (SVM) CLASSIFIER USING SMALL MIXED PIXELS

It is important that the training stage of a supervised classification is designed to provide the spectral information. On the design of the training stage of a classification typically calls for the use of a large sample of randomly selected pure pixels in order to characterize the classes. Such guidance is generally made without regard to the specific nature of the application in-hand, including the classifier to be used. An approach to the training of a support vector machine (SVM) classifier that is the opposite of that generally promoted for training set design is suggested. This approach uses a small sample of mixed spectral responses drawn from purposefully selected locations (geographical boundaries) in training. A sample of such data should, however, be easier and cheaper to acquire than that suggested by traditional approaches. In this research, we evaluated them against traditional approaches with high-resolution satellite data. The results proved that it can be used small mixed pixels to derive a classification with similar accuracy using a large number of pure pixels. The approach can also reduce substantial costs in training data acquisition because the sampling locations used are commonly easy to observe.