Learning Sparse CRFs for Feature Selection and Classification of Hyperspectral Imagery

Feature selection is an important task in hyperspectral data analysis. This paper presents a sparse conditional random field (SCRF) model to select relevant features for the classification of hyperspectral images and, meanwhile, to exploit the contextual information in the form of spatial dependences in the images. The sparsity arises from the use of a Laplacian prior on the CRF parameters, which encourages the parameter estimates to be either significantly large or exactly zero. To joint the feature selection and classifier design, this paper develops an efficient sparse training method, which divides the training of SCRF into the sparse trainings of two simpler classifiers. Experiments on the real-world hyperspectral image attest to the accuracy, sparsity, and efficiency of the proposed model.