Superpixel-Guided Variable Gabor Phase Coding Fusion for Hyperspectral Image Classification

3-D Gabor, as a typical filter, plays a critical role in extracting discriminative spectral–spatial features from hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, the performance of traditional 3-D Gabor is limited by the uniform response to each direction, which is inconsistent with the complexity of land cover distribution. It has been a continuing concern for researchers to investigate the anisotropic 3-D Gabor filters. In addition, the 3-D Gabor wavelets do not make full use of spatial distribution information, thus reducing the accuracy. This article proposes a superpixel-guided variable 3-D Gabor phase coding fusion ( Su VGF) framework for HSI classification with limited training samples. First, the variable 3-D Gabor filters are created based on various asymmetric sinusoidal waves and spatial kernel sizes to achieve multidirectional features. Second, the local Gabor phase ternary pattern is adopted to encode the Gabor phases and improve the feature discrimination. Meanwhile, a scale map is produced by the majority voting of multiscale simple noniterative clustering (SNIC) and entropy rate superpixel (ERS) segmentation, which contains sufficient and complementary spatial distribution information. Then, geometric optimization is employed on the scale map to reduce noise disturbances. Finally, all Gabor features are modified by the filter with the guidance of a scale map and fused together as a confidence cube, and the random forest algorithm is exploited for classification. The Su VGF is applied to three real hyperspectral datasets to demonstrate the superiority of higher accuracy, stronger robustness, and less computational complexity in comparison with several state-of-the-art ones.