Machine Learning-based Classification of Hyperspectral Imagery

The classification of hyperspectral imagery (HSI) is essential in the surface of earth observation. Due to the continuous large number of bands, HSI data provide rich information about the object of study; however, it suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Dimensionality reduction is an essential aspect of Machine learning classification. The algorithms based on feature extraction can overcome the data dimensionality issue, thereby allowing the classifiers to utilize comprehensive models to reduce computational costs. This paper assesses and compares two HSI classification techniques. The first is based on the Joint Spatial-Spectral Stacked Autoencoder (JSSSA) method, the second is based on a shallow Artificial Neural Network (SNN), and the third is used the SVM model. The performance of the JSSSA technique is better than the SNN classification technique based on the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient values. We observed that the JSSSA based method surpasses the SNN technique with an overall accuracy of 96.13% and Kappa coefficient value of 0.95. SNN also achieved a good accuracy of 92.40% and a Kappa coefficient value of 0.90, and SVM achieved an accuracy of 82.87%. The current study suggests that both JSSSA and SNN based techniques prove to be efficient methods for hyperspectral classification of snow features. This work classified the labeled/ground-truth datasets of snow in multiple classes. The labeled/ground-truth data can be valuable for applying deep neural networks such as CNN, hybrid CNN, RNN for glaciology, and snow-related hazard applications.