Semi-supervised segmentation of land cover images using nonlinear canonical correlation analysis with multiple features and t-SNE

Image segmentation is a clustering task whereby each pixel is assigned a cluster label. Remote sensing data usually consists of multiple bands of spectral images in which there exist semantically meaningful land cover subregions, co-registered with other source data such as LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) data, where available. This suggests that, in order to account for spatial correlation between pixels, a feature vector associated with each pixel may be a vectorized tensor representing the multiple bands and a local patch as appropriate. Similarly, multiple types of texture features based on a pixel's local patch would also be beneficial for encoding locally statistical information and spatial variations, without necessarily labelling pixel-wise a large amount of ground truth, then training a supervised model, which is sometimes impractical. In this work, by resorting to label only a small quantity of pixels, a new semi-supervised segmentation approach is proposed. Initially, over all pixels, an image data matrix is created in high dimensional feature space. Then, t-SNE projects the high dimensional data onto 3D embedding. By using radial basis functions as input features, which use the labelled data samples as centres, to pair with the output class labels, a modified canonical correlation analysis algorithm, referred to as RBF-CCA, is introduced which learns the associated projection matrix via the small labelled data set. The associated canonical variables, obtained for the full image, are applied by k-means clustering algorithm. The proposed semi-supervised RBF-CCA algorithm has been implemented on several remotely sensed multispectral images, demonstrating excellent segmentation results.