An elliptical basis function network for classification of remote sensing images

An elliptical basis function (EBF) network is proposed in this study for the classification of remotely sensed images. Though similar in structure, the EBF network differs from the well-known radial basis function (RBF) network by incorporating full covariance matrices and uses the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the basis functions. Since remotely sensed data often take on mixture-density distributions in the feature space, the proposed network not only possesses the advantage of the RBF mechanism but also utilizes the EM algorithm to compute the maximum likelihood estimates of the mean vectors and covariance matrices of a Gaussian mixture distribution in the training phase. Experimental results show that the EM-based EBF network is faster in training, more accurate, and simpler in structure. Keywords-artificial neural networks, classification, elliptical basis functions, EM algorithm, mixture densities, radial basis functions, remotely sensed image