*Article* **Hashing Based Hierarchical Feature Representation for Hyperspectral Imagery Classification**

**Bin Pan 1,2,3, Zhenwei Shi 1,2,3,\*, Xia Xu 1,2,3 and Yi Yang 4**


Received: 24 September 2017; Accepted: 24 October 2017; Published: 27 October 2017

**Abstract:** Integrating spectral and spatial information is proved effective in improving the accuracy of hyperspectral imagery classification. In recent studies, two kinds of approaches are widely investigated: (1) developing a multiple feature fusion (MFF) strategy; and (2) designing a powerful spectral-spatial feature extraction (FE) algorithm. In this paper, we combine the advantages of MFF and FE, and propose an ensemble based feature representation method for hyperspectral imagery classification, which aims at generating a hierarchical feature representation for the original hyperspectral data. The proposed method is composed of three cascaded layers: firstly, multiple features, including local, global and spectral, are extracted from the hyperspectral data. Next, a new hashing based feature representation method is proposed and conducted on the features obtained in the first layer. Finally, a simple but efficient extreme learning machine classifier is employed to ge<sup>t</sup> the classification results. To some extent, the proposed method is a combination of MFF and FE: instead of feature fusion or single feature extraction, we use an ensemble strategy to provide a hierarchical feature representation for the hyperspectral data. In the experiments, we select two popular and one challenging hyperspectral data sets for evaluation, and six recently proposed methods are compared. The proposed method achieves respectively 89.55%, 99.36% and 77.90% overall accuracies in the three data sets with 20 training samples per class. The results prove that the performance of the proposed method is superior to some MFF and FE based ones.

**Keywords:** hashing ensemble; hierarchical feature; hyperspectral classification
