Aurora Image Classification Based on Multi-Feature Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Due to the rich physical meaning of aurora morphology, the classification of aurora images is an important task for polar scientific expeditions. However, the traditional classification methods do not make full use of the different features of aurora images, and the dimension of the description feat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Yanfei Zhong, Rui Huang, Ji Zhao, Bei Zhao, Tingting Liu
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10020233
Description
Summary:Due to the rich physical meaning of aurora morphology, the classification of aurora images is an important task for polar scientific expeditions. However, the traditional classification methods do not make full use of the different features of aurora images, and the dimension of the description features is usually so high that it reduces the efficiency. In this paper, through combining multiple features extracted from aurora images, an aurora image classification method based on multi-feature latent Dirichlet allocation (AI-MFLDA) is proposed. Different types of features, whether local or global, discrete or continuous, can be integrated after being transformed to one-dimensional (1-D) histograms, and the dimension of the description features can be reduced due to using only a few topics to represent the aurora images. In the experiments, according to the classification system provided by the Polar Research Institute of China, a four-class aurora image dataset was tested and three types of features (MeanStd, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), and shape-based invariant texture index (SITI)) were utilized. The experimental results showed that, compared to the traditional methods, the proposed AI-MFLDA is able to achieve a better performance with 98.2% average classification accuracy while maintaining a low feature dimension.