Design and Implementation of an Object-Based AdaBoost Algorithm Based on Active Learning for Land-Cover Classification in High-Resolution Images

By improvement of the spatial resolution of remote sensing images, more accurate information are provided from the image scene such as texture structures. However, extraction of land cover information from these datas has become a challenging process due to the high spectral diversity and the heterogeneity of surface materials. Visual interpretation is costly and time consuming and automatic interpretation of images does not necessarily lead to high accuracy. Achieving optimal interpretation accuracy requires the design of automatic algorithms that are capable of dealing with the complexity of the image scene. To overcome this problem, object-based image analysis (OBIA) that is sensitive to the image scene morphology, can be particularly effective in an urban area where the density of man-made structures is high. In object-based classification, pixels of a segment are analyzed in combination with each other. So the dimensions of the problem space are reduced, in compared to the pixel-based method, which leads to increasing the computational speed. Meanwhile, due to the different sizes of image segments, supervised object-based classification faces challenges in creating an optimal training set. In this research, AdaBoost algorithm was selected for the object-based classification, to overcome the problem of feature space imbalance, due to the small number of training samples in comparison with the high dimensions of the feature space (including spectral, spatial and geometric features), two strategies were proposed. In the first approach an active learning mechanism was integrated with AdaBoost to produce optimal training data set (OTD) and in another approach based on the feature-to-feature correlation (redundancy) and the feature-to-class correlation (relevance), the candidate feature subset (CFS) was generated to reduce the size of the feature space. To evaluate the proposed method, the developed algorithm was performed on the standard dataset of Vaihingen in Germany and the results were compared with the pixel-based classification. In order to evaluate the signification of the results, the McNemar statistical test was used. The experimental results showed that the proposed object-based approach improved the overall accuracy by 6% and the kappa coefficient by 7% compared to the pixel-based approach. Also, the computational speed of proposed object-based AdaBoost was significantly increased compared to the pixel-based approach. These results indicate the superiority of the proposed approach both in terms of accuracy and processing speed.