The fine-grained classification of hyperspectral image with small training samples is a major challenge for all kinds of classifiers. The signal-to-noise ratio of hyperspectral image is usually difficult to improve

and the magnitude of noise has a direct impact on classification results. Thus

noise reduction is one of the most important pretreatment measures for hyperspectral image classification. Employing the strong relevance between adjacent bands of hyperspectral images and the relevance between adjacent pixels in the space

a novel hyperspectral image classification method based on multi-level denoising and filtering is proposed. One two-phase Sparse and Low Rank Matrix Decomposition (SLRMD) method is introduced to remove the noise with high energy. At the first phase

the hyperspectral image is segmented

and each patch will use the SLRMD method to perform noise reduction based on the spectral correlation between the pixels within the same patch. At the second phase

the pixels of all patches will be merged together for noise reduction based on the spectral correlation of the adjacent bands of the hyperspectral image. Secondly

then principal component analysis (PCA) is introduced to remove the noise with low energy. Thirdly

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify the de-noised and dimension reduced hyperspectral dataset. Finally

guided filter is introduced to remove the " salt and pepper noise” in the classification map. We use the Indian Pines hyperspectral dataset as an example to verify the noise reduction effect of sparse and low rank matrix decomposition methods. The effect of image noise reduction is very obvious

and the bands after noise reduction show very strong correlation. The pixel spectrum of the original image contains a lot of noise information

especially in the first few bands and the last few bands

whereas the pixel spectrum of the low rank image becomes very smooth. The Spectral and Spatial De-Correlation (SSDC) and Local Variance Estimation (LVE) methods were used to evaluate the change of image quality before and after noise reduction. The signal-to-noise ratio of hyperspectral images is significantly improved after low rank matrix decomposition

especially at both ends of the spectral range. Two hyperspectral images

i.e.

Indian Pines and University of Pavia

and some related classification methods are used for comparative experiments.The results show that the classification accuracy of our method is 25.85% and 13.2% higher than that of the SVM method

and 6.04% and 5.79% higher than the best method respectively. The two-phase SLRMD method proposed in this paper has better strong noise removal effect than the conventional SLRMD method

and it is more helpful to improve the classification accuracy of hyperspectral image. Moreover

SLRMD

principal component analysis and guided filtering

these three noise reduction and dimension reduction methods are highly complementary

so they should be used together to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of hyperspectral image and make the classification results more natural and smooth.