A self-trained semisupervised SVM approach to the remote sensing land cover classification

• Applied semisupervised SVM method to address the remote sensing classification.
• Introduced the SAMPSO algorithm to get the SVM optimum parameters.
• Used the GK fuzzy clustering algorithm to reduce the impact of ineffective labels.

Support vector machines (SVM) are nowadays receiving increasing attention in remote sensing applications although this technique is very sensitive to the parameters setting and training set definition. Self-training is an effective semisupervised method, which can reduce the effort needed to prepare the training set by training the model with a small number of labeled examples and an additional set of unlabeled examples. In this study, a novel semisupervised SVM model that uses self-training approach is proposed to address the problem of remote sensing land cover classification. The key characteristics of this approach are that (1) the self-adaptive mutation particle swarm optimization algorithm is introduced to get the optimum parameters that improve the generalization performance of the SVM classifier, and (2) the Gustafson–Kessel fuzzy clustering algorithm is proposed for the selection of unlabeled points to reduce the impact of ineffective labels. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated firstly with samples from remote sensing data and then by identifying different land cover regions in the remote sensing imagery. Experimental results show that accuracy level is increased by applying this learning scheme, which results in the smallest generalization error compared with the other schemes.