A new fast algorithm for multiclass hyperspectral image classification with SVM

The support vector machine (SVM) has been a dominant machine-learning technique in the last decade and has demonstrated its efficiency in many applications. Research on classification of hyperspectral images have shown the efficiency of this method to overcome the Hughes phenomenon for classification of such images. A major drawback of classification by SVM is that this classifier was originally developed to solve binary problems, and the algorithms for multiclass problems usually have a high-computational load. In this article, a new and fast method for multiclass problems is proposed. This method has two stages. In the first stage, samples are classified by a maximum likelihood (ML) classifier, and in the second stage, SVM selects the final label of a sample among high-probability classes for that sample by a tree structure. So, for each sample, only some classes must be searched by SVM to find its label. The uncertainty of ML classification for a sample is obtained by the entropy of probabilities, and the number of classes that must be searched by SVM for a sample is obtained based on the uncertainty of that sample in the primary ML classification. This approach is compared with two widely used multiclass algorithms: one-against-one (OAO) and directed acyclic graph (DAGSVM). The obtained results on real data from the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) revealed less computational time and better accuracy compared to these multiclass algorithms.