Multi-class SVM based remote sensing image classification and its semi-supervised improvement scheme

Support vector machine (SVM), which is based on statistical learning theory (SLT), has shown much better performance than most other existing machine learning methods, which are based on the traditional statistics. The original SVM was developed to solve the dichotomy classification problem. Various approaches have been presented to solve multi-class problems. Using multi-class SVM classifier we have obtained high class rate of 95.4% in remote sensing image classification. However for the class number of remote sensing image is much great, manually obtaining of training samples is a much time-consuming work. Hence, we present a multi-class SVM based semi-supervised approach. We choose the initial cluster centers manually first, then label the samples as the training ones automatically with fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm. It is believed that this method upgrades the classification efficiency greatly with practicable class rate.