RECURSIVE HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGES

Abstract. Partition based clustering techniques are widely used in data mining and also to analyze hyperspectral images. Unsupervised clustering only depends on data, without any external knowledge. It creates a complete partition of the image with many classes. And so, sparse labeled samples may be used to label each cluster, and so simplify the supervised step. Each clustering algorithm has its own advantages, drawbacks (initialization, training complexity). We propose in this paper to use a recursive hierarchical clustering based on standard clustering strategies such as K-Means or Fuzzy-C-Means. The recursive hierarchical approach reduces the algorithm complexity, in order to process large amount of input pixels, and also to produce a clustering with a high number of clusters. Moreover, in hyperspectral images, a classical question is related to the high dimensionality and also to the distance that shall be used. Classical clustering algorithms usually use the Euclidean distance to compute distance between samples and centroids. We propose to implement the spectral angle distance instead and evaluate its performance. It better fits the pixel spectrums and is less sensitive to illumination change or spectrum variability inside a semantic class. Different scenes are processed with this method in order to demonstrate its potential.