Multiple Feature-Based Superpixel-Level Decision Fusion for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Classification

The rapid increase in the number of remote sensing sensors makes it possible to develop multisource feature extraction and fusion techniques to improve the classification accuracy of surface materials. It has been reported that light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data can contribute complementary information to hyperspectral images (HSIs). In this article, a multiple feature-based superpixel-level decision fusion (MFSuDF) method is proposed for HSIs and LiDAR data classification. Specifically, superpixel-guided kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is first designed and applied to HSIs to both reduce the dimensions and compress the noise impact. Next, 2-D and 3-D Gabor filters are, respectively, employed on the KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data to obtain discriminative Gabor features, and the magnitude and phase information are both taken into account. Three different modules, including the raw data-based feature cube (concatenated KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data), the Gabor magnitude feature cube, and the Gabor phase feature cube (concatenation of the corresponding Gabor features extracted from the KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data), can be, thus, achieved. After that, random forest (RF) classifier and quadrant bit coding (QBC) are introduced to separately accomplish the classification task on the aforementioned three extracted feature cubes. Alternatively, two superpixel maps are generated by utilizing the multichannel simple noniterative clustering (SNIC) and entropy rate superpixel segmentation (ERS) algorithms on the combined HSIs and LiDAR data, which are then used to regularize the three classification maps. Finally, a weighted majority voting-based decision fusion strategy is incorporated to effectively enhance the joint use of the multisource data. The proposed approach is, thus, named MFSuDF. A series of experiments are conducted on three real-world data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFSuDF approach. The experimental results show that our MFSuDF can achieve the overall accuracy of 73.64%, 93.88%, and 74.11% for Houston, Trento, and Missouri University and University of Florida (MUUFL) Gulport data sets, respectively, when there are only three samples per class for training.