Classification of imbalanced hyperspectral imagery data using support vector sampling

Due to the imbalance in obtaining labeled samples for different land-cover classes, hyperspectral image classification encounters the issue of imbalanced classification. In this paper, a novel and effective method is proposed to address the imbalanced learning problem in hyperspectral image classification, which combines support vector machine (SVM) and sampling strategy. The main novelty and contribution of our paper are that we propose to do sampling referring to the support vectors (SVs) rather than the training data to provide a balanced distribution during the model learning. Sampling among the training data may be time consuming, while sampling referring to the SVs is more efficient and representative with much lower complexity. Therefore, the proposed method is expected to be simple and effective for imbalanced learning problem. Experimental results on real hyperspectral image dataset show that our method can effectively improve the classification accuracy for the minority classes in the imbalanced dataset.