Weighted Chebyshev Distance classification method for hyperspectral imaging

The main objective of classification is to partition the surface materials into non-overlapping regions by using some decision rules. For supervised classification, the hyperspectral imagery (HSI) is compared with the reflectance spectra of the material containing similar spectral characteristic. As being a spectral similarity based classification method, prediction of different level of upper and lower spectral boundaries of all classes spectral signatures across spectral bands constitutes the basic principles of the Multi-Scale Vector Tunnel Algorithm (MS-VTA) classification algorithm. The vector tunnel (VT) scaling parameters obtained from means and standard deviations of the class references are used. In this study, MS-VT method is improved and a spectral similarity based technique referred to as Weighted Chebyshev Distance (WCD) method for the supervised classification of HSI is introduced. This is also shown to be equivalent to the use of the WCD in which the weights are chosen as an inverse power of the standard deviation per spectral band. The use of WCD measures in terms of the inverse power of standard deviations and optimization of power parameter constitute the most important side of the study. The algorithms are trained with the same kinds of training sets, and their performances are calculated for the power of the standard deviation. During these studies, various levels of the power parameters are evaluated based on the efficiency of the algorithms for choosing the best values of the weights.