Hyperspectral image classification using set-to-set distance

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has attracted much attention and extensive research efforts over the past decade. Due to few labeled samples versus high dimensional features, it is a challenging problem in practice. Recently, combining the pixel spectral information and the spatial (neighborhood) information has been verified to be effective for HSI classification. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for HSI classification using set-to-set distance (SSD). Based on the assumption that neighbor pixels tend to belong to the same class with high probability, we model a test pixel and its neighbor pixels as a testing set (or a neighbor set) inspired by bilateral filtering. Meanwhile, the training pixels belong to the same class are modeled as a training set. Therefore, the classification is based on comparisons of sets distances. Experiments on a real HSI dataset show that our proposed method outperforms a number of existing state-of-the-art approaches.