IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 10, NO. 3, MARCH 2017 1151
Exploring Structural Consistency in Graph
Regularized Joint Spectral-Spatial Sparse Coding
for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Changhong Liu, Jun Zhou, Senior Member, IEEE, Jie Liang, Yuntao Qian, Member, IEEE, Hanxi Li,
and Yongsheng Gao, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—In hyperspectral image classification, both spectral
and spatial data distributions are important in describing and iden-
tifying different materials and objects in the image. Furthermore,
consistent spatial structures across bands can be useful in captur-
ing inherent structural information of objects. These imply that
three properties should be considered when reconstructing an im-
age using sparse coding methods. First, the distribution of different
ground objects leads to different coding coefficients across the spa-
tial locations. Second, local spatial structures change slightly across
bands due to different reflectance properties of various object ma-
terials. Finally and more importantly, some sort of structural con-
sistency shall be enforced across bands to reflect the fact that the
same object appears at the same spatial location in all bands of
an image. Based on these considerations, we propose a novel joint
spectral-spatial sparse coding model that explores structural con-
sistency for hyperspectral image classification. For each band im-
age, we adopt a sparse coding step to reconstruct the structures in
the band image. This allows different dictionaries be generated to
characterize the band-wise image variation. At the same time, we
enforce the same coding coefficients at the same spatial location
in different bands so as to maintain consistent structures across
bands. To further promote the discriminating power of the model,
we incorporate a graph Laplacian sparsity constraint into the
model to ensure spectral consistency in the dictionary generation
step. Experimental results show that the proposed method outper-
forms some state-of-the-art spectral-spatial sparse coding methods.
Index Terms—Graph Laplacian regularizer, hyperspectral im-
age, sparse coding, structural consistency.
Manuscript received April 15, 2016; revised July 9, 2016 and August 10,
2016; accepted August 11, 2016. Date of publication September 8, 2016; date
of current version February 13, 2017. This work was supported by the Australian
Research Council Linkage under Project LP150100658, the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 61571393, Grant 61462042, Grant
61365002, and Grant 61262036, and the Visiting Scholars Special Funds from
Young and Middle-aged Teachers Development Program for Universities in
Jiangxi Province. (Corresponding author: Jun Zhou.)
C. Liu and H. Li are with the School of Computer and Information Engineer-
ing, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China (e-mail: ahong286@
126.com; hanxi.li@nicta.com.au).
J. Zhou is with the School of Information and Communication Technol-
ogy, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD 4111, Australia (e-mail: jun.zhou@
griffith.edu.au).
J. Liang is with the School of Engineering, Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia (e-mail: jie.liang@anu.edu.au).
Y. Qian is with the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, College of
Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China (e-mail:
ytqian@zju.edu.cn; yuntaoq@yahoo.com.cn).
Y. Gao is with the School of Engineering, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD
4111, Australia (e-mail: yongsheng.gao@griffith.edu.au).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTARS.2016.2602305
I. INTRODUCTION
R
EMOTE sensing hyperspectral images (HSI) are acquired
in hundreds of bands to measure the reflectance of earth
surface, discriminate various materials, and classify ground ob-
jects. HSI classification aims at assigning each pixel with one
thematic class in a scene [1]. Various machine learning models
have been proposed for this purpose, such as Bayesian model [1],
random forest [2], neural networks [3], support vector machines
(SVM) [4]–[7], sparse representation [8]–[13], and deep learn-
ing [14], [15].
Many HSI classification methods make prediction based on
the spectral response at a single pixel [6], [8], [9], [16]–[19].
While spectral information is essential in image classification
and material identification, information extracted from spatial
domain is very useful to discriminate various targets made of
the same materials [20], [21]. To address this need, spectral-
spatial HSI classification approaches have been reported, each
type of approach exploring and exploiting different ways to in-
tegrate spatial features with spectral features. Mura et al. and
Ghamisi et al. proposed mathematical morphology methods to
analyze spatial relationships between pixels using structured el-
ements [22], [23]. Markov random field methods considered
spatial information by adding to the objective function a term
that defines spatial correlations in the prior model [24], [25].
Qian et al. developed three-dimensional (3-D) discrete wavelet
transform to extract 3-D features along spectral and spatial di-
mensions simultaneously [26]. Moreover, many researchers pro-
posed sparse representation methods to include spatial sparsity
constraints or Kernel function to integrate spectral and spatial
features [10], [12], [27]–[31].
Among these approaches, sparse representation-based
classifiers have achieved the state-of-the-art performance [27],
[32]. They provide an effective way of modeling the spatial
neighborhood relationship and the distribution of atoms in the
spectral or spatial domain, so that both spectral and spatial
information can be seamlessly integrated and modeled. In
sparse representation, a test sample is treated as a linear
combination of atoms from training s amples or a learned
dictionary. A sparse regularization term is normally included
to learn a discriminative representation of images [33]–[35].
Recently, structured sparsity priors are also incorporated into
reconstruction methods [12], [36]–[39]. These include joint
sparsity constraint [40], group sparsity constrain [41], graph
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