A Spectral-Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Images Based on the Algebraic Multigrid Method and Hierarchical Segmentation Algorithm

The algebraic multigrid (AMG) method is used to solve linear systems of equations on a series of progressively coarser grids and has recently attracted significant attention for image segmentation due to its high efficiency and robustness. In this paper, a novel spectral-spatial classification method for hyperspectral images based on the AMG method and hierarchical segmentation (HSEG) algorithm is proposed. Our method consists of the following steps. First, the AMG method is applied to hyperspectral imagery to construct a multigrid structure of fine-to-coarse grids based on the anisotropic diffusion partial differential equation (PDE). The vertices in the multigrid structure are then considered as the initial seeds (markers) for growing regions and are clustered to obtain a sequence of segmentation results. In the next step, a maximum vote decision rule is employed to combine the pixel-wise classification map and the segmentation maps. Finally, a final classification map is produced by choosing the optimal grid level to extract representative spectra. Experiments based on three different types of real hyperspectral datasets with different resolutions and contexts demonstrate that our method can obtain 3.84%–13.81% higher overall accuracies than the SVM classifier. The performance of our method was further compared to several marker-based spectral-spatial classification methods using objective quantitative measures and a visual qualitative evaluation