AMODIFIEDADAPTABLENEARESTFEATURESPACECLASSIFIERFOR
REMOTESENSINGIMAGES
1,
Yang Lang Chang *, Lena Chang , Tzu-Wei Tseng , and Chihyuan Chu
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan
2
Department of Communications and Guidance Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan
Abstract
In this paper, a novel technique, known as a modified
adaptable nearest feature space (MANFS) classifier, is
proposed for supervised classification of remote sensing
images. The original nearest feature space (NFS) may
cause misclassification if the test samples are close to the
different class training samples which are highly
overlapped. Thus it is difficult to discriminate different
classes. Compared to the original NFS classifier, we
propose a novel MANFS classifier, which can precisely
analysis the coverage of the feature space used in NFS
and perfectly confine the extensible ranges of each feature
space of NFS, to reduce the impact of the overlapping
training samples of different categories. Experimental
results show that MANFS achieves better classification
accuracy than the original NFS one for remote sensing
image.
Keywords— Nearest feature space, Modified adaptable nearest
feature space classifier, Remote sensing images.
I. INTRODUCTION
Hyperspectral imaging collects information from
across the electromagnetic spectrum. Generally speaking,
it provides huge spectral information for the applications
of data analysis and interpretations, such as land-cover
classification. However, in pace with the spectrum
dimensionality rises, which produces the huge and
continuous high dimension image, the classification
accuracy will decrease. This is called Hughes
phenomenon [1]. Therefore, how to utilize these high
volumes of data is an important issue for environmental
decision-makers.
To solve this problem, feature extraction and
dimensionality reduction (DR) methods have been
proposed. One solved this problem by Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) [2]. It is a de-correlation
technique and widely used for data compression and
interpretation. PCA can calculate the largest eigenvectors
(principal components) corresponding to the largest
eigenvalues of the original data space, which reduces the
unnecessary information of the variables as well.
Therefore, the original data can be dealt with in a low
dimensional feature space. Chang et al. [3] proposed
Fisher criterion based PCA (FCPCA), which is the most
popular feature extraction method. In this paper, we apply
FCPCA for DR to optimize PCA to the Fisher’s criterion.
‹,(((
2 1 1
The computation of two scatter matrices, within-class
scatter Sw and between-class scatter Sb, is based on the
Fisher criterion and used to derive the maximum
discriminant vectors. A transformation matrix can be
obtained from the eigenvectors of Sb Sw-1 associated with
the largest eigenvalues in maximizing the criterion.
Many pattern classification methods have been
proposed [4-9]. One of the most popular classifiers is
nearest neighbor (NN) classifier [4, 5]. However, the
performance of NN is limited by available training sample
in each class. To overcome this problem, the nearest
linear combination (NLC) approach [6], including the
nearest feature line (NFL) [7, 8], explores information
contained in more than one feature point within the same
class. Multiple feature points are linearly combined,
yielding a linear subspace for class representation,
wherein the class of the nearest subspace to the query
point is chosen as the final classification. This leads to the
concept of the nearest feature subspace (NFS) which is
proposed and applied on FR as a promising classifier [9].
NFS needs to construct feature space (FS) by three
training samples belonging to the same class, which can
better handle the variations of the samples than NFL as it
can provide more information to virtually enlarge the
training samples set.
NFS can obtain well classification results, but its
efficiency is decreased when samples of different classes
are not far apart or even overlapped [10-12]. To overcome
aforementioned problem, we propose a new method
called modified adaptable nearest feature space
(MANFS). Through analyzing the coverage of the FS
before the event, we limit the extensible range of each FS
by the analysis result so as to reduce the impact of the
overlapping between each category. It is based on NFS by
correcting the coverage of the FS to improve the
performance of NFS classification.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. MANFS Classifier
Fig. 1 shows the graph of building a feature space. In
Fig. 1, the feature points ( X11 , X 21 , X 31 ) and ( X 12 , X 22 , X 33 )
belong to class-1 and class-2, respectively. The feature
surface FS123
1
and FS123
2
consists of three feature points of
class-1 and class-2, respectively.
 ,*$566
 1
ř1
2
ř2

1
ř2 2
ř1

1 2
ř3 ř3

Fig.1Diagram of NFS

In order to find the categories of unknown point q,
the distance between the characteristics surface of each
category and point are obtained by the Euclidean distance.
Next, find all characteristics surface which is nearest to
the feature point. Then, the category of characteristics
surface is the category of the unknown point q closed to.
d ( q, NFS ) min1d c d C min q  FS xyz
c (1)
1d x , y d N c
xz yzz
where C means the category of feature points, Nc means
the number of feature points each category owns, FS xyz
c
is
consist of x, y, z included category c. Figure 2 is the
diagram of the NFS. In Fig. 2, we find the projected point
Fig. 3 Two classes with red and blue categories have overlapping area,
which causes NFS classifier error
In order to improve this problem, the MANFS
method, based on NFS, is proposed. We use an example
to further explain the procedures of NFS, as shown in Fig.
4. In Fig. 4, we choose a point Y as test sample. Next, the
remaining test samples, X iA , X jA , X kA , X iB , X Bj , X kB , will
be classified as 2 FS sets, Ɇ X iA X jA X kA and Ɇ
X iB X Bj X kB , and find their center IA and IB, respectively.
Then, we can obtain the ͐A and ͐B as shown in Fig. 4.
Final, we simplify the Fig. 4 to two-dimensional model,
as shown in Fig. 5.
Ń

q’ of unknown point q on characteristic line FLcxp by the řŬ

Ń
řŪ
ŚȽ ŊŃ
NFL. Then, we obtain the distance between q and q' by
Ń
ŚŃ Ń
ȧġIJ ȧġŃ řū
Euclidean distance. Ś

ł ȧġł
řū
ClassA
Śł
Ŋł ClassB
ł
řŬ
ł
řŪ TestSample
Xz Fig. 4 MANFS algorithms misjudgment correction

p In order to make sure that the scope ofɆ X iB X Bj X kB

q' does not overlap with Ɇ X iA X jA X kA , we move YB to Y’B. This
Xy
action is done to enable the distance from Y to category B is
farther than to category A.
Xx
nŃ
Fig. 2 Diagram of the NFS concept
ŊŃ
ŚȽ
Ń
ŚŃ
ȧġIJ ȧġŃ
In order to find the category of unknown point q, we must Ś

use NFS to find C3N c feature surfaces. The computational ȧġł ClassA
nł
complexity is very large. However, NFS can’t achieve ClassB
high accuracy rate as shown in Figure 3. In Fig. 3, the red Ŋł
Śł
TestSample
and blue categories have overlapping area, which easily
Fig. 5 Two-dimensional model MANFS algorithms misjudgment
causes NFS classifier error. correction


T1 is shown as below,
YYB YYB (2)
T1 cos1 ( ) cos1 ( )
YY 'B YY ' A
where YY ' B is the distance from Y to Y’B , YYB is the

distance from Y to YB, and YY ' A is the distance from Y to

Y’A. Therefore, we obtain the result that YY ' A YY ' B .

In figure 6, we assume test point is belong to Class

A. First, we choose one of FS Ɇ X iA X Aj X kA and correct it
contrast to other FS except Class A, such as Class B and
Class C. Then, we correct all of the test point in Fig. 6 and
record the corrected angel of each FS. Final, we will
average the angel of FS and use it as a basis to correct the angel.

ŚŃ

Śń
Ś
řū
ł
ClassA Fig. 8 Map of NTC used in the experiment.
Śł ClassB
ł
řŪ ClassC
Next, we correct all of the shortest Euclidean
ł
Ŋ
ł TestSample
řŬ
Fig. 6 FS multiple categories amendments distance from test point T to each FS by correct angel
obtained before. Then, we use new shortest Euclidean
distance to find the nearest FS and classify it to the
After that, we will increase the unknown test sample point category of this FS. In Fig. 7, the Euclidean distance from
T as shown in Fig 7. First, we obtain projected points TA T to T’A is TT ' A and from T to T’B is TT ' B . Therefore,
and͐A of the unknown test point T.
test point T will be classified to Class A because TT ' A is
řŬ
Ń
shorter than TT ' B .
Ń

ŕŃ ŕȽ
Ń řŪ

ȧġIJŃ Ń
ȧġŃ řū
III. EXPERIMENTALRESULTS
ŕ
ł
ȧġł The image datasets used in the experiments were
řū ȧġIJł ŕł
generated from the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging
ŕȽ
ł

řŬ
ł Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instruments. They were created
by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA/Ames
ł
řŪ
Fig. 7 The concept of MANFS classification.
Research Center in 1992. The images were captured from
an airborne/infrared light imaging spectrometer in the
Then, we use correct angel͐1A to correct TTA . The Northwest Tippecanoe County (NTC) as shown in Fig. 8.
correction formula is defined as: Although they contain 200 bands and 9 land classes, only
nine kinds of classes are adopted in the experiments, i.e.,
Corn-no till (CN), Corn-min till (CM), Grass/Pasture
TTA (3) (GP), Grass/Trees (GT), Hay-windrowed (HW),
d (T , FS ic, j ,k ) TT ' A
cos(T1 A ) Soybeans-no till (SN), Soybeans-min till (SM), Soybeans-
clean till (SC), and Woods (WO).The classifiers use the
where d (T , FS ic, j , k ) is the modified reference distance form same training pixels in the learning phase and the same
test pixels for the evaluation. The quality of each
point T to FS Ɇ X iA X jA X kA , TT ' A is the length from
compared classifier is measured by overall accuracies. 30
point T to point T ' A , TTA is the length from point T to labeled samples were chosen as training samples, whereas
270 labeled samples were used as test samples. The
point TA , and cos(T1A ) is TTA . experimental results of the classification accuracy vs. the
TT ' A number of features for NTC dataset are shown in Fig. 9.



Fig.9 The overall accuracy of MANFS and NFS on the NTC dataset
The experimental results show the proposed MANFS has
a better overall classification accuracy than original NFS.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a novel MANFS supervised
classification approach to the remote sensing images.
Compared to the original NFS classifier, the proposed
MANFS classifier can precisely analysis the coverage of
the feature space used in NFS and perfectly confine the
extensible ranges of each feature space of NFS to reduce
the impact of the overlapping training samples of different
categories if the test samples are very close to the training
samples. The experimental results showed the proposed
MANFS is an effective method for classification and
improves the accuracy of remote sensing image
classification significantly.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and
Technology, Taiwan, under Grant No. MOST 105-2221-
E-027-120 and MOST 105-2116-M-027-001.
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