Representative band selection for hyperspectral image classification

High dimensional curse for hyperspectral images is one major challenge in image classification. In this work, we introduce a novel spectral band selection method by representative band mining. In the proposed method, the distance between two spectral bands is measured by using disjoint information. For band selection, all spectral bands are first grouped into clusters, and representative bands are selected from these clusters. Different from existing clustering-based band selection methods which select bands from each cluster individually, the proposed method aims to select representative bands simultaneously by exploring the relationship among all band clusters. The optimal representative band selection is based on the criteria of minimizing the distance inside each cluster and maximizing the distance among different representative bands. These selected bands can be further applied in hyperspectral image classification. Experiments are conducted on the 92AV3C Indian Pine data set. Experimental results show that the disjoint information-based spectral band distance measure is effective and the proposed representative band selection approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for high dimensional image classification.