Semisupervised classification of polarimetric SAR image via superpixel restrained deep neural network

The classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image is of crucial significance for SAR applications. In this letter, a superpixel restrained deep neural network with multiple decisions (SRDNN-MDs) is proposed for PolSAR image classification, which not only extracts effective superpixel spatial features and degrades the influence of speckle noises but also deals with the limited training samples. First, the polarimetric features of coherency matrix and Yamaguchi decomposition are extracted as initial features, and superpixel segmentation is conducted on the Pauli color-coded image to acquire the superpixel averaged features. Then, an SRDNN based on sparse autoencoders is proposed to capture superpixel correlative features and reduce speckle noises. After that, MDs, including nonlocal decision and local decision, are developed to select credible testing samples. Finally, our deep network is updated by the extended training set to yield the final classification map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SRDNN-MD yields higher accuracies compared with other related approaches, which indicate that the proposed method is able to capture superpixel correlative information and adds the information of unlabeled samples to improve the classification performance.