Ship Classification in SAR Image by Joint Feature and Classifier Selection

Selecting discriminate features and constructing an appropriate classifier are two essential factors for ship classification in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. Unfortunately, these two factors are rarely considered together by existing studies. We propose a joint feature and classifier selection method by integrating the classifier selection strategy into a wrapper feature selection framework. The sequential forward floating searching algorithm is improved to conduct efficient searching for an optimal triplet of feature-scaling-classifier. Comprehensive experiments on two data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can select the optimal combination of a nonredundant complementary feature subset, appropriate scaling, and classifier to improve the performance of ship classification in a SAR image.