CNN-Based Polarimetric Decomposition Feature Selection for PolSAR Image Classification

In order to better interpret polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images, many scholars tend to do target decomposition for PolSAR images and utilize the obtained features to perform subsequent classification. These target decomposition features play an important role in terrain classification but completely utilizing them produces a high computational complexity. Furthermore, some features have a negative impact on the classification task. Therefore, selecting the appropriate amount of high-quality features is of great significance to the classification task. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based feature selection algorithm for PolSAR image classification. First, we design a 1-D CNN for feature selection, then train the designed network with all the decomposition features to obtain a trained model. Second, the Kullback–Leibler distance (KLD) between different features is utilized as a standard to select feature subsets. Third, feature subsets with excellent performance form the final results. Due to the special structure of the 1-D CNN, repetitively training model is avoided when the input changes. Different from traditional feature selection methods, our method considers the performance of features combination rather than single feature contribution. To this end, the feature subsets selected by the proposed method are more useful to the classification task. Innovatively introducing KLD in the selection stage avoids random selection and improves the selection efficiency. Finally, we validate the performance of selected feature subsets in traditional and deep learning classification frameworks. Experiments demonstrate that features selected by the proposed method have a good performance comparing with others on three real PolSAR data sets.