Classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images with support vector machines

This paper addresses the problem of the classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images by support vector machines (SVMs). First, we propose a theoretical discussion and experimental analysis aimed at understanding and assessing the potentialities of SVM classifiers in hyperdimensional feature spaces. Then, we assess the effectiveness of SVMs with respect to conventional feature-reduction-based approaches and their performances in hypersubspaces of various dimensionalities. To sustain such an analysis, the performances of SVMs are compared with those of two other nonparametric classifiers (i.e., radial basis function neural networks and the K-nearest neighbor classifier). Finally, we study the…