A Fast Cluster-Assumption Based Active-Learning Technique for Classification of Remote Sensing Images

In this paper, we propose a simple, fast, and reliable active-learning technique for solving remote sensing image classification problems with support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The main property of the proposed technique consists in its robustness to biased (poor) initial training sets. The presented method considers the 1-D output space of the classifier to identify the most uncertain samples whose labeling and inclusion in the training set involve a high probability to improve the classification results. A simple histogram-thresholding algorithm is used to find out the low-density (i.e., under the cluster assumption, the most uncertain) region in the 1-D SVM output space. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compared it with other active-learning techniques proposed in the remote sensing literature using multispectral and hyperspectral data. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed technique provided the best tradeoff among robustness to biased (poor) initial training samples, computational complexity, classification accuracy, and the number of new labeled samples necessary to reach convergence.