Exemplar Component Analysis: A Fast Band Selection Method for Hyperspectral Imagery

How to find the representative bands is a key issue in band selection for hyperspectral data. Very often, unsupervised band selection is associated with data clustering, and the cluster centers (or exemplars) are considered ideal representatives. However, partitioning the bands into clusters may be very time-consuming and affected by the distribution of the data points. In this letter, we propose a new band selection method, i.e., exemplar component analysis (ECA), aiming at selecting the exemplars of bands. Interestingly, ECA does not involve actual clustering. Instead, it prioritizes the bands according to their exemplar score, which is an easy-to-compute indicator defined in this letter measuring the possibility of bands to be exemplars. As a result, ECA is of high efficiency and immune to distribution structures of the data. The experiments on real hyperspectral data set demonstrate that ECA is an effective and efficient band selection method.