Shapelet-based sparse image representation for landcover classification of hyperspectral data

This paper presents a novel sparse representation-based classifier for landcover mapping of hyperspectral image data. Each image patch is factorized into segmentation patterns, also called shapelets, and patch-specific spectral features. The combination of both is represented in a patch-specific spatial-spectral dictionary, which is used for a sparse coding procedure for the reconstruction and classification of image patches. Hereby, each image patch is sparsely represented by a linear combination of elements out of the dictionary. The set of shapelets is specifically learned for each image in an unsupervised way in order to capture the image structure. The spectral features are assumed to be the training data. The experiments show that the proposed approach shows superior results in comparison to sparse-representation based classifiers that use no or only limited spatial information and behaves competitive or better than state-of-the-art classifiers utilizing spatial information and kernelized sparse representation-based classifiers.