Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The availability of hyperspectral images with improved spectral and spatial resolutions provides the opportunity to obtain accurate land-cover classification. In this paper, a novel methodology that combines spectral and spatial information for supervised hyperspectral image classification is proposed. A feature reduction strategy based on independent component analysis is the main core of the spectral analysis, where the exploitation of prior information coupled to the evaluation of the reconstruction error assures the identification of the best class-informative subset of independent components. Reduced attribute profiles (APs), which are designed to address well-known issues related to information redundancy that affect the common morphological APs, are then employed for the modeling and fusion of the contextual information. Four real hyperspectral data sets, which are characterized by different spectral and spatial resolutions with a variety of scene typologies (urban, agriculture areas), have been used for assessing the accuracy and generalization capabilities of the proposed methodology. The obtained results demonstrate the classification effectiveness of the proposed approach in all different scene typologies, with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques.