Active Learning Algorithms for the Classification of Hyperspectral Sea Ice Images

Sea ice is one of the most critical marine disasters, especially in the polar and high latitude regions. Hyperspectral image is suitable for monitoring the sea ice, which contains continuous spectrum information and has better ability of target recognition. The principal bottleneck for the classification of hyperspectral image is a large number of labeled training samples required. However, the collection of labeled samples is time consuming and costly. In order to solve this problem, we apply the active learning (AL) algorithm to hyperspectral sea ice detection which can select the most informative samples. Moreover, we propose a novel investigated AL algorithm based on the evaluation of two criteria: uncertainty and diversity. The uncertainty criterion is based on the difference between the probabilities of the two classes having the highest estimated probabilities, while the diversity criterion is based on a kernel -means clustering technology. In the experiments of Baffin Bay in northwest Greenland on April 12, 2014, our proposed AL algorithm achieves the highest classification accuracy of 89.327% compared with other AL algorithms and random sampling, while achieving the same classification accuracy, the proposed AL algorithm needs less labeling cost.