LAUSR

Classification is an important technique for remotely sensed hyperspectral image (HSI) exploitation. Often, the presence of wrong (noisy) labels presents a drawback for accurate supervised classification. In this article, we introduce a new framework for noisy label detection that combines a superpixel-to-pixel weighting distance (SPWD) and density peak clustering. The proposed method is able to accurately detect and remove noisy labels in the training set before HSI classification. It considers two weak assumptions when exploiting the spectral–spatial information contained in the HSI: 1) all the pixels in a superpixel belong to the same class and 2) close pixels in spectral space have the same label. The proposed method consists of the following steps. First, a superpixel segmentation step is used to obtain self-adaptive spatial information for each training sample. Then, a metric is utilized to measure the spectral distance information between each superpixel and pixel. Meanwhile, in order to overcome the first weak assumption, we use $K$ nearest neighbors to obtain the closest neighborhoods of pixels around each superpixel, and a Gaussian weight is employed to mitigate the second weak assumption by adapting the original distance information. Next, the noisy labels in the original training set are removed by a density threshold-based decision function. Finally, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier is employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed SPWD detection method in terms of classification accuracy. Experiments performed on several real HSI data sets demonstrate that the method can effectively improve the performance of classifiers trained with noisy training sets in terms of classification accuracy.