Combined Conditional Random Fields Model for Supervised PolSAR Images Classification

Abstract

More features and contextual information can be extracted and exploited to improve classification accuracy in complex Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) imagery classification. However, the problems of overfitting and feature interference caused by the increased high dimensions of features lead to poor classification performance. To address these problems, a PolSAR image classification method based on combined Conditional Random Fields (CRF) is proposed in this paper. Unlike the traditional way of utilizing multiple feature information wherein multiple feature vectors are directly stacked to form a new one, combined CRF first forms multiple feature subsets according to different feature types and utilizes these feature subsets to train the same CRF model to obtain multiple child classifiers, thus obtaining multiple classification results. Then, the final classification result is gained by fusing multiple child classification results with the normalized overall classification accuracy of each classifier as the weight. Extensive experiments conducted on two realworld PolSAR images demonstrate that the accuracy of the proposed method is significantly improved than that of the single child classifier. For both the data sets used for performance evaluation, the classification accuracies of the proposed method increased by 13.38% and 11.55% than those of the method of stacking features, respectively, and by 13.78% and 14.75% than those of support vector machine-based method, respectively.

Keywords

• Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR)
• Supervised classification
• Conditional Random Fields (CRF)
• Combined model