A novel spectral-spatial classification technique for multispectral images using extended multi-attribute profiles and sparse autoencoder

Image classification is a prominent topic and a challenging task in the field of remote sensing. Recently many various classification methods have been proposed for satellite images specifically the frameworks based on spectral-spatial feature extraction techniques. In this paper, a feature extraction strategy of multispectral data is taken into account in order to develop a new classification framework by combining Extended Multi-Attribute Profiles (EMAP) and Sparse Autoencoder (SAE). Extended Multi-Attribute Profiles is employed to extract the spatial information, then it is joined to the original spectral information to describe the spectral-spatial property of the multispectral images. The obtained features are fed into a Sparse Autoencoder as input. Finally, the learned spectral-spatial features are embedded into the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Experiments are conducted on two multispectral (MS) images such as we construct the ground truth maps of the corresponding images. Our approach based on EMAP and deep learning (DL), proves its huge potential to achieve a high classification accuracy in reasonable running time and outperforms traditional classifiers and others classification approaches.