A generalized orthogonal subspace projection approach to multispectral image classification

Orthogonal subspace projection (OSP) has been successfully applied to hyperspectral image processing. In order for OSP to be effective, the number of bands must be no less than that of signatures to be classified so that there are sufficient dimensions to accommodate individual signatures to discriminate one another via orthogonal projection. This intrinsic constraint is not an issue for hyperspectral images since they generally have hundreds of bands which are more than the number of signatures resident within images. It, however, may not be true for multispectral images where the number of signatures to be classified is greater than the number of bands such as S-band SPOT images. This paper presents a generalization of OSP, called generalized OSP (GOSP) to relax this constraint in such a fashion that OSP can be extended to multispectral image processing in an unsupervised fashion. The idea of GOSP is to create new additional band images nonlinearly from original multispectral images so as to achieve sufficient dimensionality prior to OSP classification. It is then followed by an unsupervised OSP classifier, called automatic target detection and classification algorithm (ATDCA) for classification. The effectiveness of the proposed GOSP is evaluated by a 3-band SPOT and a 4-band Landsat MSS images. The experimental results has shown that GOSP significantly improves the classification performance of OSP.