Active extreme learning machines for quad-polarimetric SAR imagery classification

• Active extreme learning machines were proposed for polarimetric SAR image classification.
• Four quad-polarimetric SAR data sets were used to evaluate the performance of the method.
• Polarimetric and multi scale spatial features improve classification accuracy, if jointly exploited.

Supervised classification of quad-polarimetric SAR images is often constrained by the availability of reliable training samples. Active learning (AL) provides a unique capability at selecting samples with high representation quality and low redundancy. The most important part of AL is the criterion for selecting the most informative candidates (pixels) by ranking. In this paper, class supports based on the posterior probability function are approximated by ensemble learning and majority voting. This approximation is statistically meaningful when a large enough classifier ensemble is exploited. In this work, we propose to use extreme learning machines and apply AL to quad-polarimetric SAR image classification. Extreme learning machines are ideal because of their fast operation, straightforward solution and strong generalization. As inputs to the so-called active extreme learning machines, both polarimetric and spatial features (morphological profiles) are considered. In order to validate the proposed method, results and performance are compared with random sampling and state-of-the-art AL methods, such as margin sampling, normalized entropy query-by-bagging and multiclass level uncertainty. Experimental results for four quad-polarimetric SAR images collected by RADARSAT-2, AirSAR and EMISAR indicate that the proposed method achieves promising results in different scenarios. Moreover, the proposed method is faster than existing techniques in both the learning and the classification phases.