A New GPU Implementation of Support Vector Machines for Fast Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

The storage and processing of remotely sensed hyperspectral images (HSIs) is facing important challenges due to the computational requirements involved in the analysis of these images, characterized by continuous and narrow spectral channels. Although HSIs offer many opportunities for accurately modeling and mapping the surface of the Earth in a wide range of applications, they comprise massive data cubes. These huge amounts of data impose important requirements from the storage and processing points of view. The support vector machine (SVM) has been one of the most powerful machine learning classifiers, able to process HSI data without applying previous feature extraction steps, exhibiting a robust behaviour with high dimensional data and obtaining high classification accuracies. Nevertheless, the training and prediction stages of this supervised classifier are very time-consuming, especially for large and complex problems that require an intensive use of memory and computational resources. This paper develops a new, highly efficient implementation of SVMs that exploits the high computational power of graphics processing units (GPUs) to reduce the execution time by massively parallelizing the operations of the algorithm while performing efficient memory management during data-reading and writing instructions. Our experiments, conducted over different HSI benchmarks, demonstrate the efficiency of our GPU implementation.