Visible-NIR hyperspectral classification of grass based on multivariate smooth mapping and extreme active learning approach

Grass community classification is the basis for the development of animal husbandry and dynamic monitoring of environment, which has become a critical problem to further strengthen the intelligent management of grassland. Compared with grass survey based on satellite remote sensing, the visible near infrared (NIR) hyperspectral not only monitor dynamically in a short distance, but also have high dimensions and detailed spectral information in each pixel. However, the hyperspectral labeled sample for classification is expensive and manual selection is more subjective. In order to solve above limitations, we proposed a visible-NIR hyperspectral classification model for grass based on multivariate smooth mapping and extreme active learning (MSM–EAL). Firstly, MSM is used to preprocess and reconstruct the spectrum. Secondly, by jointing XGBoost and active learning (AL), the advanced samples with the largest amount of information are actively selected to improve the performance of target classification. Innovation lies in: (1) MSM global enhanced preprocessing spectral reconstruction algorithm is proposed, in which isometric feature mapping is effectively applied to the grass hyperspectral for the first time. (2) EAL framework is constructed to solve the issue of high cost and small number for hyperspectral labeled samples, at the same time, enhance the physical essence behind spectral classification more intuitively. A field hyperspectral collection platform is assembled to establish nm resolution visible-NIR hyperspectral dataset of grass, Grass1, containing 750 samples, which to verify the effectiveness of the model. Experiments on the Grass1 dataset confirmed that compared with the full spectrum, the time consumption of MSM was reduced by 9.471 s with guaranteed overall accuracy (OA). Comparing EAL with AL, and other classification algorithms, EAL improves OA 22.2% over AL, and XAL has the best performance value on Kappa, Macro, Recall and F1-score, respectively. Altogether, the lightweight MSM–EAL model realizes intelligent and real-time classification, providing a new method for obtaining high-precision inter group classification of grass.