3-D Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) faces three major challenging issues, which are generally overlooked. One is how to address the background (BKG) issue due to its unknown complexity. Another is how to deal with imbalanced classes since various classes have different levels of significance, particularly, small classes. A third one is fractional class membership assignment (FCMA) resulting from a soft-decision classifier. Unfortunately, the commonly used classification measures, overall accuracy (OA), average accuracy (AA), or kappa coefficient are generally not designed to cope with these issues. This article develops a 3-D receiver operating characteristic (3-D ROC) analysis from a detection point of view to explore how these three issues can be resolved for HSIC. Specifically, it first develops one-class classifier in BKG (OCCB), called constrained energy minimization (CEM), and multiclass classifier in BKG (MCCB), called linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) in conjunction with 3-D ROC analysis to address the BKG issue. Then, by considering a small class as a signal to be detected, its class accuracy can be interpreted as signal detection power/probability so that the 3-D ROC analysis can be used to address the imbalanced class issue. Finally, FCMA can be treated as a detector by converting a soft-decision classifier to a hard-decision classifier in such a manner that the 3-D ROC analysis is also readily applied. The experimental results demonstrate that 3-D ROC analysis provides a very useful evaluation tool to analyze the classification performance.