Context guided belief propagation for remote sensing image classification.

We propose a context guided belief propagation (BP) algorithm to perform high spatial resolution multispectral imagery (HSRMI) classification efficiently utilizing superpixel representation. One important characteristic of HSRMI is that different land cover objects possess a similar spectral property. This property is exploited to speed up the standard BP (SBP) in the classification process. Specifically, we leverage this property of HSRMI as context information to guide messages passing in SBP. Furthermore, the spectral and structural features extracted at the superpixel level are fed into a Markov random field framework to address the challenge of low interclass variation in HSRMI classification by minimizing the discrete energy through context guided BP (CBP). Experiments show that the proposed CBP is significantly faster than the SBP while retaining similar performance as compared with SBP. Compared to the baseline methods, higher classification accuracy is achieved by the proposed CBP when the context information is used with both spectral and structural features.