Remotely Sensed Image Classification Using Sparse Representations of Morphological Attribute Profiles

In recent years, sparse representations have been widely studied in the context of remote sensing image analysis. In this paper, we propose to exploit sparse representations of morphological attribute profiles for remotely sensed image classification. Specifically, we use extended multiattribute profiles (EMAPs) to integrate the spatial and spectral information contained in the data. EMAPs provide a multilevel characterization of an image created by the sequential application of morphological attribute filters that can be used to model different kinds of structural information. Although the EMAPs´ feature vectors may have high dimensionality, they lie in class-dependent low-dimensional subpaces or submanifolds. In this paper, we use the sparse representation classification framework to exploit this characteristic of the EMAPs. In short, by gathering representative samples of the low-dimensional class-dependent structures, any given sample may by sparsely represented, and thus classified, with respect to the gathered samples. Our experiments reveal that the proposed approach exploits the inherent low-dimensional structure of the EMAPs to provide state-of-the-art classification results for different multi/hyperspectral data sets.