Optimal Clustering Framework for Hyperspectral Band Selection

Band selection, by choosing a set of representative bands in hyperspectral image (HSI), is an effective method to reduce the redundant information without compromising the original contents. Recently, various unsupervised band selection methods have been proposed, but most of them are based on approximation algorithms which can only obtain suboptimal solutions toward a specific objective function. This paper focuses on clustering-based band selection, and proposes a new framework to solve the above dilemma, claiming the following contributions: 1) An optimal clustering framework (OCF), which can obtain the optimal clustering result for a particular form of objective function under a reasonable constraint. 2) A rank on clusters strategy (RCS), which provides an effective criterion to select bands on existing clustering structure. 3) An automatic method to determine the number of the required bands, which can better evaluate the distinctive information produced by certain number of bands. In experiments, the proposed algorithm is compared to some state-of-the-art competitors. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is robust and significantly outperform the other methods on various data sets

Improving hyperspectral band selection by constructing an estimated reference map

We investigate band selection for hyperspectral image classification. Mutual information (MI) measures the statistical dependence between two random variables. By modeling the reference map as one of the two random variables, MI can, therefore, be used to select the bands that are more useful for image classification. A new method is proposed to estimate the MI using an optimally constructed reference map, reducing reliance on ground-truth information. To reduce the interferences from noise and clutters, the reference map is constructed by averaging a subset of spectral bands that are chosen with the best capability to approximate the ground truth. To automatically find these bands, we develop a searching strategy consisting of differentiable MI, gradient ascending algorithm, and random-start optimization. Experiments on AVIRIS 92AV3C dataset and Pavia University scene dataset show that the proposed method outperformed the benchmark methods. In AVIRIS 92AV3C dataset, up to 55% of bands can be removed without significant loss of classification accuracy, compared to the 40% from that using the reference map accompanied with the dataset. Meanwhile, its performance is much more robust to accuracy degradation when bands are cut off beyond 60%, revealing a better agreement in the MI calculation. In Pavia University scene dataset, using 45 bands achieved 86.18% classification accuracy, which is only 1.5% lower than that using all the 103 bands

Evaluation of hyperspectral band selection techniques for real-time applications

Processing hyperspectral image data can be computationally expensive and difficult to employ for real-time applications due to its extensive spatial and spectral information. Further, applications in which computational resources may be limited can be hindered by the volume of data that is common with airborne hyperspectral image data. This paper proposes utilizing band selection to down-select the number of spectral bands to consider for a given classification task such that classification can be done at the edge. Specifically, we consider the following state of the art band selection techniques: Fast Volume-Gradient-based Band Selection (VGBS), Improved Sparse Subspace Clustering (ISSC), Maximum-Variance Principal Component Analysis (MVPCA), and Normalized Cut Optimal Clustering MVPCA (NC-OC-MVPCA), to investigate their feasibility at identifying discriminative bands such that classification performance is not drastically hindered. This would greatly benefit applications where time-sensitive solutions are needed to ensure optimal outcomes. In this research, an NVIDIA AGX Xavier module is used as the edge device to run trained models on as a simulated deployed unmanned aerial system. Performance of the proposed approach is measured in terms of classification accuracy and run time

Adaptive distance-based band hierarchy (ADBH) for effective hyperspectral band selection.

Band selection has become a significant issue for the efficiency of the hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. Although many unsupervised band selection (UBS) approaches have been developed in the last decades, a flexible and robust method is still lacking. The lack of proper understanding of the HSI data structure has resulted in the inconsistency in the outcome of UBS. Besides, most of the UBS methods are either relying on complicated measurements or rather noise sensitive, which hinder the efficiency of the determined band subset. In this article, an adaptive distance-based band hierarchy (ADBH) clustering framework is proposed for UBS in HSI, which can help to avoid the noisy bands while reflecting the hierarchical data structure of HSI. With a tree hierarchy-based framework, we can acquire any number of band subset. By introducing a novel adaptive distance into the hierarchy, the similarity between bands and band groups can be computed straightforward while reducing the effect of noisy bands. Experiments on four datasets acquired from two HSI systems have fully validated the superiority of the proposed framework

Band Ranking via Extended Coefficient of Variation for Hyperspectral Band Selection

Hundreds of narrow bands over a continuous spectral range make hyperspectral imagery rich in information about objects, while at the same time causing the neighboring bands to be highly correlated. Band selection is a technique that provides clear physical-meaning results for hyperspectral dimensional reduction, alleviating the difficulty for transferring and processing hyperspectral images caused by a property of hyperspectral images: large data volumes. In this study, a simple and efficient band ranking via extended coefficient of variation (BRECV) is proposed for unsupervised hyperspectral band selection. The naive idea of the BRECV algorithm is to select bands with relatively smaller means and lager standard deviations compared to their adjacent bands. To make this simple idea into an algorithm, and inspired by coefficient of variation (CV), we constructed an extended CV matrix for every three adjacent bands to study the changes of means and standard deviations, and accordingly propose a criterion to allocate values to each band for ranking. A derived unsupervised band selection based on the same idea while using entropy is also presented. Though the underlying idea is quite simple, and both cluster and optimization methods are not used, the BRECV method acquires qualitatively the same level of classification accuracy, compared with some state-of-the-art band selection methodsPeer reviewe

Hyperspectral Band Selection Using Improved Classification Map

Although it is a powerful feature selection algorithm, the wrapper method is rarely used for hyperspectral band selection. Its accuracy is restricted by the number of labeled training samples and collecting such label information for hyperspectral image is time consuming and expensive. Benefited from the local smoothness of hyperspectral images, a simple yet effective semisupervised wrapper method is proposed, where the edge preserved filtering is exploited to improve the pixel-wised classification map and this in turn can be used to assess the quality of band set. The property of the proposed method lies in using the information of abundant unlabeled samples and valued labeled samples simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated with five real hyperspectral data sets. Compared with other wrapper methods, the proposed method shows consistently better performance