A joint band prioritization and band-decorrelation approach to band selection for hyperspectral image classification

Band selection for remotely sensed image data is an effective means to mitigate the curse of dimensionality. Many criteria have been suggested in the past for optimal band selection. In this paper, a joint band-prioritization and band-decorrelation approach to band selection is considered for hyperspectral image classification. The proposed band prioritization is a method based on the eigen (spectral) decomposition of a matrix from which a loading-factors matrix can be constructed for band prioritization via the corresponding eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Two approaches are presented, principal components analysis (PCA)-based criteria and classification-based criteria. The former includes the maximum-variance PCA and maximum SNR PCA, whereas the latter derives the minimum misclassification canonical analysis (MMCA) (i.e., Fisher's discriminant analysis) and subspace projection-based criteria. Since the band prioritization does not take spectral correlation into account, an information-theoretic criterion called divergence is used for band decorrelation. Finally, the band selection can then be done by an eigenanalysis based band prioritization in conjunction with a divergence-based band decorrelation. It is shown that the proposed band-selection method effectively eliminates a great number of insignificant bands. Surprisingly, the experiments show that with a proper band selection, less than 0.1 of the total number of bands can achieve comparable performance using the number of full bands. This further demonstrates that the band selection can significantly reduce data volume so as to achieve data compression.