A NEW SPECTRAL–SPATIAL JOINTED HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION APPROACH BASED ON FRACTAL DIMENSION ANALYSIS

To maximize the advantages of both spectral and spatial information, we introduce a new spectral–spatial jointed hyperspectral image classification approach based on fractal dimension (FD) analysis of spectral response curve (SRC) in spectral domain and extended morphological processing in spatial domain. This approach first calculates the FD image based on the whole SRC of the hyperspectral image and decomposes the SRC into segments to derive the FD images with each SRC segment. These FD images based on the segmented SRC are composited into a multidimensional FD image set in spectral domain. Then, the extended morphological profiles (EMPs) are derived from the image set through morphological open and close operations in spatial domain. Finally, all these EMPs and FD features are combined into one feature vector for a probabilistic support vector machine (SVM) classification. This approach was demonstrated using three hyperspectral images in urban areas of the university campus and downtown area of Pavia, Italy, and the Washington DC Mall area in the USA, respectively. We assessed the potential and performance of this approach by comparing with PCA-based method in hyperspectral image classification. Our results indicate that the classification accuracy of our proposed method is much higher than the accuracies of the classification methods based on the spectral or spatial domain alone, and similar to or slightly higher than the classification accuracy of PCA-based spectral–spatial jointed classification method. The proposed FD approach also provides a new self-similarity measure of land class in spectral domain, a unique property to represent hyperspectral self-similarity of SRC in hyperspectral imagery.