A Discriminative Tensor Representation Model for Feature Extraction and Classification of Multispectral LiDAR Data

Multispectral light detection and ranging (MS-LiDAR) systems open the door to the possibility in the 3-D land cover classification at a finer scale using only point cloud data. This article proposes a model based on the tensor representation for multispectral point cloud classification. The proposed method combines the 3-D local spatial structure of each multispectral point by characterizing the point with a second-order tensor. The first mode of the tensor indicates the spatial location and spectral information of each point (i.e., the row of the second-order tensor) and the second mode denotes the neighborhood geometric and spectral structures (i.e., the column of the second-order tensor). Then we develop a novel tensor manifold discriminant embedding (TMDE) algorithm to extract the geometric-spectral features for multispectral point clouds classification. TMDE solves the mapping matrices of each mode by preserving the intraclass samples' distribution further making it more compact and maximizing the distance of different classes. Finally, the support vector machine classifier with the extracted features as input is used to implement the classification of multispectral point clouds. Experiments are conducted on two real multispectral point cloud data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve significant improvements in classification accuracies in comparison with several state-of-the-art algorithms.