Inducing Contextual Classifications With Kernel Functions Into Support Vector Machines

Kernel functions have revolutionized theory and practice in the field of pattern recognition, especially to perform image classification. Besides giving rise to nonlinear variants of the well-known support vector machine (SVM), these functions have also been successfully used to classify nonvectorial data (e.g., graphs and collection of sets), in which customized metrics are created to precisely measure the similarity among such contextual data entities. This letter introduces two context-inspired kernel functions as new SVM-driven methods for remote sensing image classification. In contrast to the existing SVM-based approaches that assume only multiattribute vectors as representative features in a high-dimensional space, the proposed models formally establish comparisons between the entire sets of context-given data, thus employing these contextual measurements to drive the classification. More precisely, stochastic distances as well as hypothesis tests are conveniently handled and “kernelized” to build our models. A complete battery of experiments involving both remote sensing and real-world images is conducted to validate the performance of the proposed kernels against various well-established SVM-based methods.