Unsupervised Hyperspectral Band Selection Using Spectral–Spatial Iterative Greedy Algorithm

Hyperspectral band selection (BS) is an important technique to reduce data dimensionality for the classification applications of hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSIs). Recently, searching-based BS methods have received increasing attention for their ability to select the best subset of bands while preserving the essential information of the original data. However, existing searching-based BS methods neglect effective exploitation of the spatial and spectral prior information inherent in the data, thus limiting their performance. To address this problem, in this study, a novel unsupervised BS method called Spectral–Spatial Iterative Greedy Algorithm (SSIGA) is proposed. Specifically, to facilitate efficient local search using spectral information, SSIGA conducts clustering on all the bands by employing a K-means clustering method with balanced cluster size constraints and constructs a K-nearest neighbor graph for each cluster. Based on the nearest neighbor graphs, SSIGA can effectively explore the neighborhood solutions in local search. In addition, to efficiently evaluate the discriminability and information redundancy of the solution given by SSIGA using the spatial and spectral information of HSIs, we designed an effective objective function for SSIGA. The value of the objective function is derived by calculating the Fisher score for each band in the solution based on the results of the superpixel segmentation performed on the target HSI, as well as by computing the average information entropy and mutual information of the bands in the solution. Experimental results on three publicly available real HSI datasets demonstrate that the SSIG algorithm achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods.