IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO.
1, JANUARY 2016
SAR Image Classification via Hierarchical Sparse
Representation and Multisize Patch Features
Biao Hou, Member, IEEE, Bo Ren, Guilin Ju, Huiyan Li, Licheng Jiao, Senior Member, IEEE, and Jin Zhao
Abstract—In this letter, a novel hierarchical sparse represen-
tation-based classification (HSRC) for synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) images is proposed. Features utilized in HSRC are extracted
from the multisize patches around each pixel to precisely describe
the complex terrains. Two thresholds are introduced in the sparse
representation classifier to restrict the range of reconstruction
residual, which classifies the reliable classified points, and the rest
of the pixels are considered as the uncertain ones in the original
SAR image. Then, a new dictionary is constructed by the reliable
pixels, and the uncertain pixels will be reclassified in the next
classification layer. The hierarchical structure is very reasonable
and effective to employ simple features in each layer for describing
the various topographic types. Compared with traditional sparse
representation-based classification and support vector machines in
several fixed-size patches, the proposed method can obtain better
performance both in quantitative evaluation and visualization
results.
Index Terms—Image classification, multisize patches, sparse
representation-based classification (SRC), synthetic aperture
radar (SAR).
I. I NTRODUCTION
S YNTHETIC aperture radar (SAR) is a coherent airborne
or spaceborne side-looking radar system which utilizes
the flight path of the platform to simulate an extremely large
antenna or aperture electronically. It is not affected by light
condition and can be used day and night under various con-
ditions. SAR has been successfully applied to many fields,
such as environmental monitoring, earth-resource mapping, and
military systems. It can generate high-resolution images in
different terrains by exploiting the movement of airborne and
spaceborne platforms. Therefore, SAR image classification is
very essential in the field of remote sensing image understand-
ing and interpretation.
Recently, the research of automatic classification based on
high-resolution SAR image has obtained rapid development.
Different classifiers can be used in image classification such as
support vector machine (SVM) [1], neural network (NN) [2],
and sparse representation-based classification (SRC) [3].
Although the traditional SVM and NN show high accuracy
and reliability in pattern recognition, the computational cost
Manuscript received May 18, 2015; revised August 6, 2015 and October 18,
2015; accepted October 18, 2015. Date of publication November 6, 2015; date
of current version December 24, 2015. This work was supported in part by
the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61271302 and
61072106 and in part by the National Research Foundation for the Doctoral
Program of Higher Education of China under Grant 20130203110009.
The authors are with the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image
Understanding of Ministry of Education of China, Xidian University, Xi’an
710071, China (e-mail: avcodec@hotmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2015.2493242
1545-598X © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
33
is expensive, and they are sensitive to the features. Sparse
representation was first proposed by Mallat and Zhang [4] and
has been proven to be an extremely powerful tool in image
processing. It has been widely used in face recognition [5],
color image restoration [6], image super-resolution [7], and
so on. These applications mainly depend on the observation
that a target signal can be sparsely approximated by a linear
combination of elementary signals from a data set. What is
more, sparse representation has been also applied to remote
sensing image processing, such as SAR image compression [8],
hyperspectral imagery classification [9], ship classification in
TerraSAR-X images [3], polarimetric SAR image classification
[10], and SAR image segmentation [11].
The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much
occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to
choose the training samples to maximize robustness to occlu-
sion [12]. It represents the testing samples in an overcomplete
dictionary in which the atoms are the training samples. If each
class in training samples has sufficient atoms, it can represent
the testing sample as a linear combination of the training
samples. In SRC, the sparse coefficients associated with the
different classes are selected to reconstruct the original signal.
Then, the residual between the original and the reconstruction
signal is defined as a criterion, and the final result will be
determined with the minimum residual. The basic ideas of this
algorithm are linear description hypothesis and spatial joint rep-
resentation mechanism. In fact, SRC cannot be applied to SAR
image classification directly due to the imaging mechanisms
being different from that of nature imagery. However, if a SAR
image is transformed into a specific feature space, SRC can be
efficiently used in SAR images [3], [10]. In this letter, we utilize
a gray-level histogram [13] and a gray-level co-occurrence
matrix (GLCM) [14] to get the features of a SAR image.
Gray-level histogram is stable in the presence of noise and over
change in view and can be used to distinguish and characterize
the objects. Therefore, it can extract an effective distribution
feature from the SAR image and be applied in a large amount
of classification tasks. GLCM is also used to represent SAR
image texture, and we utilize a range of different size patches
to adequately capture both microtextures and macrotextures in
the original SAR image. Thus, a discriminative feature vector
is composed of the gray-level histogram and GLCM.
In this letter, we add a double-threshold decision condition
to SRC, which separates out the reliable pixels from the orig-
inal SAR images, and the remaining ones will be classified
in the same way in the next layer until a traditional sparse
representation classifier outputs the final result (Fig. 1 explic-
itly depicts this algorithm with a hierarchical characteristic).
Therefore, we call it hierarchical sparse representation classifi-
cation (HSRC). In other words, the supervised dictionary in the
34
Fig. 1. Multisize patch-based HSRC for SAR image classification.
next classification layer is constructed based on the previous
classification result. Due to the existence of speckle and the
complex appearance in the single terrain class, the patch-
based feature extraction is proposed. In [15], multiple scale
patches extracting spatial information are exploited to classify
the hyperspectral image via the sparse representation method. A
SAR image also contains different sizes of textons (refer to the
fundamental microstructures in an image [16]), so the feature of
a fixed-size patch cannot well represent terrains. Combining the
characteristics of multisize patches with HSRC, we extract the
feature vectors from the patches of different sizes to construct
different dictionaries in each classification layer for adaptively
representing the terrains. Experimental results show that the
proposed method outperforms SVM and traditional SRC within
different fixed-size patches in terms of classification accuracy
and enhances the visual effect in several real SAR images.
This letter is organized as follows. Section II briefly intro-
duces the SRC method. In Section III, the proposed algorithm
is described. Experimental results are shown in Section IV. The
conclusions are given in Section V.
II. SRC
SRC represents the samples from a single class that lies in a
linear subspace. Assume that Kclasses are known, e.g., we can
define a dictionary constructed by concatenating feature vectors
of those classes. The testing sample y can be formulated by a
series of training samples as follows:
y = DΨ0 ∈ Rm
where Ψ0 = [0, . . . , 0, ϕi,1 , ϕi,2 , . . . , ϕi,ni , 0, . . . , 0]T ∈ Rn is
a coefficient vector whose entries are zeros except those as-
sociated with the ith class. The sparser the coefficient Ψ0 is,
the easier it can estimate the identity of the testing sample y. It
is necessary to find the sparsest solution to satisfy y = DΨ0 .
Based on the aforementioned analysis, the problem about SRC
can be modeled as
Ψ̂0 = arg min Ψ0 subject to DΨ = y
where  · 0 denotes the 0 -norm. Depending on the devel-
opment in sparse representation and compressed sensing, it
has been proved that if the solution Ψ0 is sparse enough, the
solution to 0 -minimization problem equals to the solution to
1 -minimization one, which can be relaxed as
Ψ̂1 = arg min Ψ1 subject to DΨ = y.
Let δi : Rn → Rn be the characteristic function for each
class. For Ψ ∈ Rn , δi (Ψ) is a new coefficient vector in which
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016
nonzero entries are the ones in Ψ that associated with class
i. Using the vector δi (Ψ), we can get a linear reconstruction
ŷi = Dδi (Ψ̂) to approximate the testing sample y [12]. Then,
we can classify y according to the minimization of residual
between y and ŷ as follows:
 
 
min ri (y) = y − Dδi (Ψ̂) . (4)
i 2
In order to get the sparse coefficients, we employ the orthog-
onal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm to solve the sparsity-
constrained optimization problem in (2), and the class label i is
obtained by (4).
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
The framework of our method is shown in Fig. 1. In this
section, we will introduce the proposed method in detail.
A. Multisize Patch-Based Dictionary
In the application of sparse representation, constructing a
dictionary is the first step. The dictionary in our method is not
constructed directly by pixel values. To counter the complexity
of topography and geomorphology and aperture ambiguous
appearance in the SAR image, it is necessary to transform the
pixel value space into feature space, which not only reduces
the computation complexity but also extracts the discrimina-
tive features from the SAR image. In our method, two 16-D
and 4-D feature vectors are produced by exploiting statistics
properties in the gray-level histogram and utilizing texture
statistics distribution in GLCM, respectively. We concatenate
these two types of vectors to form a 20-D feature vector for
representing each pixel. This nonlinear feature will provide
competitive performance by representing statistical information
and capturing texture information in adjacent areas.
We select ni vectors of training samples from the ith class
in the hth layer as columns to construct a matrix Ahi =
[xhi,1 , xhi,2 , . . . , xhi,ni ] ∈ Rm×ni , where m denotes the dimen-
sion of the feature vector. Then, we define the dictionary Dh
(1) as the concatenation of the ni training sample vectors of all K
defined classes in the fixed hth layer
   
Dh = Ah1 , Ah2 , . . . , AhK = xh1,1 , xh1,2 , . . . , xhK,nK (5)
where Dh denotes a fixed hierarchical dictionary. Let h =
{h1 , h2 , . . . , hH } enumerate the H latent layers; H also means
the total classification number. Feature vectors are extracted
from a fixed h-level patch to represent pixel points and con-
struct a fixed-level dictionary Dh . We can define the patch size
(2) (odd) as Sh = {S1 , S2 , . . . , SN }, S1 > S2 > · · · > SN , where
Sh and N are the size and the number of patches, respectively.
As mentioned earlier, the number of layers is associated with
the patch sizes, but they are not always one-to-one correspon-
dent. The multisize patch-based method is similar to the human
visual system, which always glances at the outline of the object
first and then carefully observes the details. In the experiments,
we only use three sizes to extract the feature of each pixel.
(3) Let PS be the resolution of the image. First, we select a size
Sinit = 2∗ floor(PS∗ 3/2) + 1 and then choose an appropriate
largest odd patch size Slarge based on different terrain types
and the size of the texton in the neighborhood of Sinit . Second,
HOU et al.: SAR IMAGE CLASSIFICATION VIA HIERARCHICAL SPARSE REPRESENTATION AND PATCH FEATURES 35

in order to capture the finer structures, we set 3 × 3 as the TABLE I

M ULTISIZE PATCH -BASED H IERARCHICAL SRC
smallest patch size Ssmall and choose a middle size Smiddle =
Ssmall + (Slarge − 3)/2 + mod((Slarge − 3)/2, 2) to connect
the classification at different layers.

B. Hierarchical SRC
SAR image classification is not the same as face recognition,
whose training samples can be controlled by a human in a
standard data set. In face recognition, the training samples can
sufficiently cover the subspace of each class. However, SAR
images contain various complex terrains. It is very difficult to
guarantee enough effective training samples to represent each
pixel. To deal with the challenge, we develop a hierarchical
sparse representation classifier with a double-threshold decision
condition to improve the classification of the SAR image.
In HSRC, we use 0 -minimization in (2) to describe the
sparse representation problem, which can be approximately
solved by a greedy pursuit algorithm. Here, the OMP algorithm
is utilized to seek the support atoms and to calculate the
representation coefficients. We make a judgment on the residual is utilized repeatedly until all H hierarchical dictionaries are
ri (y) to estimate the reliability of classified pixels. In other used up. The proposed algorithm is summarized in Table I.
words, if ri (y) lies in a specified range, we define the pixel as a
reliable one; otherwise, we define the pixel as an uncertain one,
and it may be determined in the next layer. The training samples IV. E XPERIMENTS
in the next classification process are extracted from the labeled
points in the previous classification result. The training samples In this section, experimental results are presented on two
at the first layer are randomly selected in the SAR image. At SAR images to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness
the last layer, the uncertain data points will be classified by the of the proposed method. The double thresholds are set in the
traditional SRC. empirical range, which will be investigated in the following
Here, we explicitly describe SRC with the judgment of experiment. The number of atoms in each class is set to 100,
residual ri (y) at the hth (1 ≤ h ≤ H − 1) layer, i.e., double- and the sparse level for OMP is set to the length of the feature
threshold decision condition. The minimum residual rmin h
(y) in vector. For comparison, the number of training samples for
the hth layer is given by SVM is equal to the number of atoms in the dictionary. SVM
with a radial basis function (RBF) is used to deal with the
τ h = rmin
h
(y) = min rih (y) (6) classification. A threefold cross-validation is used to seek the
i=1...K
optimal parameters for getting reasonable contrast experiments.
θh = arg min rih (y) (7) Similar to [17], the ranges for the optimization of the RBF
i=1...K
kernel width and the penalty coefficients are (0.0001, 0.001,
where K and θ denote the number of the class and the label 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10) and (0.1, 1, 10, 100, 500, 1000), respectively.
with the minimum residual. To eliminate ambiguity, let τ h
represent the minimum ri (y) in the following algorithm. The A. Influence of Thresholds
label of each pixel under the residual judgment is determined
as follows: To test the influence of thresholds on the classification result,
   a Ku-band uninhabited airborne vehicle synthetic aperture radar
 h h
min i ri
h
(y), τ h
≤ Δ1 , r h (y) − τ  ≥ Δ2 (UAVSAR) subimage (256 × 256 pixels) with 3-m resolution
Label(y)h = i=θ
uncertain, else in China Lake Airport, California, is selected, as shown in
(8) Fig. 2(a). This image consists of three types of land covers:
airport runway, pavement, and control tower. It is difficult to ob-
where Δ1 and Δ2 represent the thresholds. The two terms of tain the ground-truth map of the SAR imagery, so we manually
judgments convey two kinds of effective messages. The first select some representative points to quantitatively evaluate. The
term τ h ≤ Δ1 means that the smaller the reconstruction error training samples are randomly selected in them. The numbers
h
rmin (y) is, the more similar y and class θ are, e.g., y can of points of airport runway, pavement, and control tower are
be effectively sparsely represented by class θ under a smaller 965, 1254, and 816, respectively. According to the terrains in
residual. The second term |rih=θh (y) − τ h | ≥ Δ2 means that Image1, we denote the patch size in each layer as Sh1 = Sh2 =
only the class θ can effectively represent y and other classes Sh3 = 9 × 9, Sh4 = Sh5 = 7 × 7, and Sh6 = 3 × 3. The two
cannot represent y well. In other words, the two terms add thresholds are also very important for connecting classification
a strong constraint to the interclass distance and intraclass at different layers; it is necessary to make an analysis of the
distance, i.e., only under this condition is y very similar to influence of thresholds on the classification result.
class θ. With the increase of h, the uncertain pixels decrease First, to analyze the visualization effect of each layer step by
gradually. In our method, the multisize patch-based dictionary step, we draw Fig. 2(b)–(d) to visualize the classification results
36
Fig. 2. Three typical hierarchical structures of classification process for Im-
age1. (a) Original SAR image. (b) First layer. (c) Fifth layer. (d) Last layer.
(e)–(g) show the classification results containing uncertain points correspond-
ing to (b)–(d).
Fig. 3. (a) Classification accuracy. (b) Kappa coefficient.
at three typical layers, i.e., the first, the fifth, and the last layer,
whose sizes are 9 × 9, 7 × 7, and 3 × 3.
Let Δ1 = 0.12 and Δ2 = 0.1. Fig. 2(e)–(g) shows the varia-
tion of the number of uncertain pixels (labeled with purple) at
the corresponding layer. It can be seen that the uncertain points
always exist in the borders of different terrains and the number
of uncertain pixels decreases gradually with the increase of the
level. Furthermore, Image1 achieves better classification result
in higher hierarchy. As shown in Fig. 2(d), the pavement area
becomes smoother, and the boundary of the narrow runway gets
clearly compared with Fig. 2(b) and (c).
Second, a quantitative analysis is needed to investigate the
influence of the two thresholds on the classification result in
our method. We examine Δ1 and Δ2 in an appropriate range,
i.e., Δ1 ∈ [0.08, 0.18] and Δ2 ∈ [0.06, 0.15]. Fig. 3(a) and (b)
shows the variations of classification accuracy and kappa coef-
ficient with Δ1 and Δ2 . As shown in Fig. 3, we can see that
the performance gradually increases with the increase of Δ1
and gets a slight shake in the direction of Δ2 . Because the
training samples are selected randomly, there are fluctuations
in the curves. When Δ1 ∈ [0.15, 0.18] and Δ2 is chosen appro-
priately, the accuracies of our method will be greater than 96%.
The reason could be that the number of uncertain points varies
with thresholds at each layer, which results in the variation of
the final classification result.
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016
TABLE II
C LASSIFICATION A CCURACIES AND K APPA C OEFFICIENTS OF I MAGE 1
Fig. 4. Classification results of Image1. (a) Proposed method. (b) MultiPatch-
SVM. (c)–(e) SRC with the patch sizes 3 × 3, 7 × 7, and 9 × 9, respectively.
(f)–(h) SVM with the patch sizes 3 × 3, 7 × 7, and 9 × 9, respectively.
B. Classification Results
In this section, we investigate the classification performance
of our method and compare it with the traditional SRC and
SVM in several patch sizes. In order to accurately calculate
the classification accuracy and kappa coefficient, we carry out
our algorithm with Δ1 = 0.16 and Δ2 = 0.1, contrast methods
repeatedly for 50 times, and then average the results.
The quantitative evaluation of different methods for Image1
is shown in Table II. MultiPatch-SVM is a method that utilizes
a long feature vector concatenated by feature vectors of sev-
eral used patches in HSRC. The time consumption of HSRC
is about 218.4 s. This is because our method uses the OMP algo-
rithm to optimize the sparse representation problem. The com-

plexity of our method is O( H i=1 Si (K + C)mn), where Si
and C are the number of input points in the ith hierarchy and the
number of distinct categories, respectively. Table II also shows
that the accuracy and kappa coefficient of SVM are lower than
that of HSRC. The number of training samples is 300, which is
about 0.46 % of the total samples. The less training samples al-
ways make the cross-validation to select the inferior parameters
for the testing samples, which decreases the average accuracy
and robustness of SVM. The experiment results show that
HSRC outperforms SVM methods in the case of small samples.
Fig. 4 shows the classification results of Image1 with differ-
ent methods. Fig. 4(a) is the result of the proposed method, and
Fig. 4(b) shows the result of MultiPatch-SVM. It can be seen
that the visualization effect of Fig. 4(a) is the best among the
eight classification results of Fig. 4. It also can be seen that the
results obtained by the SRC and SVM methods at size 9 × 9 are
smooth enough in homogeneous area but lose some detailed
information. By contrast, although Fig. 4(c) and (f) show some
incorrect points in the runway and pavement areas, more sophis-
ticated structures are captured compared with that in large-size
patches. As shown in Fig. 4, we can see that only our method
HOU et al.: SAR IMAGE CLASSIFICATION VIA HIERARCHICAL SPARSE REPRESENTATION AND PATCH FEATURES
Fig. 5. Classification results of Image2. (a) Original SAR image. (b) Proposed
method. (c) MultiPatch-SVM. (d)–(f) SRC with the patch sizes 3 × 3, 9 × 9,
and 13 × 13, respectively. (g)–(i) SVM with the patch sizes 3 × 3 , 9 × 9, and
13 × 13, respectively.
TABLE III
C LASSIFICATION A CCURACIES AND K APPA C OEFFICIENTS OF I MAGE 2
clearly detects the narrow runway in blue rectangle and recog-
nizes complex objects in the green rectangle area, and also, it
achieves better visual effect in homogeneous area (red ellipse).
The second experiment is carried out on a SAR image with
more complex terrains and edges. This is an airborne X-band
SAR subimage (256 × 256 pixels) near Xi’an, China, with
5-m resolution, as shown in Fig. 5(a). The image consists of
three typical terrains: village, reviver, and crop. There are 9900,
1806, and 1085 representative points. According to the terrains
in Image2, we define the patch size in each layer as Sh1 =
Sh2 = Sh3 = 13 × 13, Sh4 = Sh5 = 9 × 9, and Sh6 = 3 × 3.
Table III gives the quantitative evaluation of different methods,
which shows that the traditional SRC gets higher classification
accuracy at each fixed size compared with SVM methods;
however, HSRC achieves the best performance.
Fig. 5 shows the classification results of Image2 with differ-
ent methods. We can see that the crop area inside the green
rectangle is misclassified as the village pixels to different
extents in Fig. 5(c)–(i). Comparing Fig. 5(d) with Fig. 5(f) and
Fig. 5(g) with Fig. 5(i) respectively, it can be seen that the large-
size patch achieves relatively better results in uniformity of the
same terrain but the boundaries between crop and river are not
well defined. On the contrary, the small-size patch shows the
better performance in the boundaries of different terrains but
fails in the uniformity of land covers. As shown in Fig. 5(b), we
achieve relatively better results in more delicate landform inside
37
the blue rectangle and homogeneous regions. Therefore, we can
make the conclusion that the proposed method inherits the merit
of the SRC method in various patch sizes, which presents a
distinct visual classification result.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this letter, a novel SAR image classification method
based on SRC is developed. The proposed method mainly adds
a double-threshold decision condition to the traditional SRC
and constructs a multihierarchy structure with various patch
size features. The experimental results show that the proposed
method outperforms the MultiPatch-SVM, SRC, and SVM
methods at different fixed-size patches. This is investigated
by the quantitative evaluation and the visualization results in
SAR images. Our future work will focus on feature extraction
and automatic selection of patches to improve the classification
performance of SAR images.
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