Spatially regularized semisupervised Ensembles of Extreme Learning Machines for hyperspectral image segmentation

This paper explores the performance of Ensembles of Extreme Learning Machine classifiers for hyperspectral image classification and segmentation in a semisupervised and spatially regularized process. The approach assumes that we have available only a small training set of labeled samples, which we enrich with a set of guessed labelings on selected samples from the vast pool of unlabeled image pixels. Selection and label guessing is conditioned to an unsupervised classification of the image pixel spectra, and to the spatial proximity to the labeled samples in the image domain. Unlabeled pixels falling in the spatial neighborhood of a labeled training sample, and belonging to the same unsupervised class, acquire its label. Unsupervised classification can be performed by any clustering technique, in this paper we have resorted to the classical K-means. The classifier built from the enriched training dataset is applied to the entire hyperspectral image. Finally, we perform a spatial regularization of the classification label image, maximizing a rather general prior smoothness criterion, by the selection of the most frequent class in each pixel neighborhood. This paper reports experiments with homogeneous ensembles of ELM, rELM, and OP-ELM classifiers, including a sensitivity analysis over the ensemble size and the number of hidden nodes. Computational experiments on four well known benchmarking hyperspectral images give state-of-the-art results.