Extracting multi-features and optimizing feature space with sparse auto-encoder over WorldView-2 images

Feature selection of very high-resolution (VHR) images is a key prerequisite for supervised classification. However, it is always difficult to acquire the features which have the highest correlation to the type of land cover for improving classification accuracy. To address this problem, this paper proposed a methodology of feature selection using the results of multiple segmentation via genetic algorithm (GA) and correlation feature selection (CFS) integrating sparse auto-encoder (SAE). Firstly, 61 features, including spectral features and spatial features, are extracted from the results of multi-scale segmentation over a WorldView-2 image in Xicheng District, Beijing. Then, 40-dimensional features and 30-dimensional features are derived from the selection with GA+CFS and the optimization with SAE, respectively. Thirdly, the final classification is achieved by logistic regression (LR) based on different subsets of features extracted from the WorldView-2 image. It is found that the result of feature selection could contribute to increase in the intra-species separation and reduction in the inner-species variability. Adding extra lower-ranked features appeared to reduce the accuracy of classification. The results indicate that the overall classification accuracy with 30-dimensional features reached 87.56%, and increased 5.61% compared to the results with 61-dimensional features. For the two kinds of optimized features, the Z-test values are all greater than 1.96, which implied that feature dimensionality reduction and feature space optimization could significantly improve the accuracy of image land cover classification. The texture features in the wavelet domain are the most important features for the study area in the WorldView-2 image classification. Adding wavelet and the grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) information, especially for GLCM features in wavelet, appeared not to improve classification accuracy. The SAE-based method can produce feature subsets for improving mapping accuracy more efficiently.