High-resolution satellite scene classification using a sparse coding based multiple feature combination

This article presents a new method for high-resolution satellite scene classification. Specifically, we make three main contributions: (1) we introduce the sparse coding method for satellite scene classification; (2) we present local ternary pattern histogram Fourier (LTP-HF) features, an improved rotation invariant texture descriptor based on LTPs; (3) we effectively combine a set of diverse and complementary features to further improve the performance. A two-stage linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier is designed for this purpose. In the first stage, the SVM is used to generate probability images with a scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), LTP-HF and colour histogram features, respectively. The generated probability images with different features are fused in the second stage in order to obtain the final classification results. Experimental results show that the suggested classification method achieves very promising performance.