Extending self-organizing maps for supervised classification of remotely sensed data

An extended self-organizing map for supervised classification is proposed in this paper. Unlike other traditional SOMs, the model has an input layer, a Kohonen layer, and an output layer. The number of neurons in the input layer depends on the dimensionality of input patterns. The number of neurons in the output layer equals the number of the desired classes. The number of neurons in the Kohonen layer may be a few to several thousands, which depends on the complexity of classification problems and the classification precision. Each training sample is expressed by a pair of vectors: an input vector and a class codebook vector. When a training sample is input into the model, Kohonens competitive learning rule is applied to selecting the winning neuron from the Kohonen layer and the weight coefficients connecting all the neurons in the input layer with both the winning neuron and its neighbors in the Kohonen layer are modified to be closer to the input vector, and those connecting all the neurons around the winning neuron within a certain diameter in the Kohonen layer with all the neurons in the output layer are adjusted to be closer to the class codebook vector. If the number of training samples is sufficiently large and the learning epochs iterate enough times, the model will be able to serve as a supervised classifier. The model has been tentatively applied to the supervised classification of multispectral remotely sensed data. The author compared the performances of the extended SOM and BPN in remotely sensed data classification. The investigation manifests that the extended SOM is feasible for supervised classification.