This paper deals with (both supervised and unsupervised) classification of multispectral Sentinel-2 images, utilizing the abundance representation of the pixels of interest. The latter pixel representation uncovers the hidden structured regions that are not often available in the reference maps. Additionally, it encourages class distinctions and bolsters accuracy. The adopted methodology, which has been successfully applied to hyperpsectral data, involves two main stages: (I) the determination of the pixel’s abundance representation; and (II) the employment of a classification algorithm applied to the abundance representations. More specifically, stage (I) incorporates two key processes, namely (a) endmember extraction, utilizing spectrally homogeneous regions of interest (ROIs); and (b) spectral unmixing, which hinges upon the endmember selection. The adopted spectral unmixing process assumes the linear mixing model (LMM), where each pixel is expressed as a linear combination of the endmembers. The pixel’s abundance vector is estimated via a variational Bayes algorithm that is based on a suitably defined hierarchical Bayesian model. The resulting abundance vectors are then fed to stage (II), where two off-the-shelf supervised classification approaches (namely nearest neighbor (NN) classification and support vector machines (SVM)), as well as an unsupervised classification process (namely the online adaptive possibilistic c-means (OAPCM) clustering algorithm), are adopted. Experiments are performed on a Sentinel-2 image acquired for a specific region of the Northern Pindos National Park in north-western Greece containing water, vegetation and bare soil areas. The experimental results demonstrate that the ad-hoc classification approaches utilizing abundance representations of the pixels outperform those utilizing the spectral signatures of the pixels in terms of accuracy.

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised spectral unmixing-based clustering method for high-spatial resolution hyperspectral images (HSIs). In contrast to most clustering methods reported so far, which are applied on the spectral signature representations of the image pixels, the idea in the proposed method is to apply clustering on the abundance representations of the pixels. Specifically, the proposed method comprises two main processing stages namely: an unmixing stage (consisting of the endmember extraction and abundance estimation (AE) substages) and a clustering stage. In the former stage, suitable endmembers are selected first as the most representative pure pixels. Then, the spectral signature of each pixel is expressed as a linear combination of the endmembers' spectral signatures and the pixel itself is represented by the relative abundance vector, which is estimated via an efficient AE algorithm. The resulting abundance vectors associated with the HSI pixels are next fed to the clustering stage. Eventually, the pixels are grouped into clusters, in terms of their associated abundance vectors and not their spectral signatures. Experiments are performed on a synthetic HSI dataset as well as on three airborne HSI datasets of high-spatial resolution containing vegetation and urban areas. The experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art clustering techniques in terms of overall accuracy, average accuracy, and kappa coefficient.