Remote Sensing, Vol. 12, Pages 655: Nonlinear Manifold Learning Integrated with Fully Convolutional Networks for PolSAR Image Classification (Remote Sensing)

Synthetic Aperture Rradar (SAR) provides rich ground information for remote sensing survey and can be used all time and in all weather conditions. Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) can further reveal surface scattering difference and improve radar’s application ability. Most existing classification methods for PolSAR imagery are based on manual features, such methods with fixed pattern has poor data adaptability and low feature utilization, if directly input to the classifier. Therefore, combining PolSAR data characteristics and deep network with auto-feature learning ability forms a new breakthrough direction. In fact, feature learning of deep network is to realize function approximation from data to label, through multi-layer accumulation, but finite layers limit the network’s mapping ability. According to manifold hypothesis, high-dimensional data exists in potential low-dimensional manifold and different types of data locates in different manifolds. Manifold learning can model core variables of the target, and separate different data’s manifold as much as possible, so as to complete data classification better. Therefore, taking manifold hypothesis as a starting point, nonlinear manifold learning integrated with fully convolutional networks for PolSAR image classification method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, high-dimensional polarized features are extracted based on scattering matrix and coherence matrix of original PolSAR data, whose compact representation is mined by manifold learning. Meanwhile, drawing on transfer learning, pre-trained Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) model is utilized to learn deep spatial features of PolSAR imagery. Considering complementary advantages, weighted strategy is adopted to embed manifold representation into deep spatial features, which are input into support vector machine (SVM) classifier for final classification. A series of experiments on three PolSAR datasets have verified effectiveness and superiority of the proposed classification algorithm.