Efficient semi-supervised feature selection for VHR remote sensing images

Feature selection is often required to select a feature subset from the original feature set of objects of very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, the majority of feature selection methods is supervised, and could fail to identify the relevant features when labeled objects are scarce. To address the problem, this paper proposes a method, efficient semi-supervised feature selection (ESFS), by effectively exploiting the underlying information of the huge amount of unlabeled objects. Firstly, probability matrix of unlabeled objects is utilized in loss function to measure the relevance of features on classes, instead of using traditional graph. Secondly, construction a l_2,1-norm regularization term is imposed to ensure the sparsity in rows of the selection matrix, and consequent feature selection. Experiments are carried on a VHR image demonstrate that ESFS outperforms other classical and latest methods.