Unsupervised classification of multispectral Landsat images with multidimensional particle swarm optimization

This article proposes a novel unsupervised classification approach for automatic analysis of multispectral Landsat images. The automatic classification of the information in multidimensional (MD) Landsat data space by dynamic clustering is addressed as an optimization problem and two recently proposed heuristic techniques based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are applied to determine the optimal (number of) clusters in a given input data space: distance metric and a proper validity index function. The first technique, the so-called MD-PSO, re-forms the native structure of swarm particles (agents) in such a way that they can make inter-dimensional passes with a dedicated dimensional PSO process. Fractional global best formation (FGBF) basically collects all promising dimensional components and fractionally creates an artificial global best (aGB) agent that has the potential to be a better ‘guide’ than the swarm’s native global best position (gbest) agent. In this study, the proposed dynamic clustering approach based on MD-PSO and FGBF techniques is applied to automatically classify the colour-coded representations of the multispectral (MD) Landsat data. The approach has been applied to real-world multispectral data and it provided quite encouraging results compared to the traditional K-means and ISODATA (iterative self-organizing data analysis) clustering methods. The proposed unsupervised technique determines the true number of classes within Landsat data for optimal classification performance while preserving spatial resolution and textural information in the classification map.