Subpixel Component Analysis for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Land-cover classification with hyperspectral imagery has been an active topic in the remote sensing community. It aims at relating a unique class label to each pixel in the scene, so that it can be well defined by a given land cover type. In this paper, we explore the intrinsic characteristics of hyperspectral imagery from a subpixel-level perspective and propose a new subpixel component analysis (SCA) approach for feature extraction and land-cover classification. The core idea of SCA is that we extract a subpixel attribute component feature from the abundance maps. Compared with the abundance maps, the extracted subpixel feature image shows higher signal-to-noise level and clearer spatial distribution details. In order to deal with spectral variability, as well as obtain representative image endmember signatures and their corresponding abundance maps, we adopt a regional clustering-based spatial preprocessing (RCSPP) strategy for endmember identification, and a partial unmixing model based on mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) for abundance estimation. Furthermore, to highlight the spatial distribution details as well as eliminate the noise disturbance in the derived abundance maps, we perform sparse image decomposition on the obtained abundance maps, thus achieving a new subpixel feature representation for classification. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed SCA approach can obtain feature representation with explicit physical meaning, clear spatial distribution details, and better noise robustness, leading to state-of-the-art classification results.