Interest Points for Hyperspectral Image Data

Interest points are widely used as point-features for image matching. This paper describes robust and efficient algorithms to extract multiscale interest points in hyperspectral images in which structural information is distributed across several spectral bands. The formulation is based on a Gaussian scale-space representation of the hyperspectral data cube, and the use of a principal components decomposition to combine information efficiently across spectral bands. A spectral distance measure is used to characterize spatial relations between neighboring hyperspectral pixels. In addition, we describe methods for preprocessing a pair of hyperspectral images, clustering the spectral signatures of interest points, and using the resulting data for matching points under simple geometric transformations. The stability of the resulting interest points in time-lapse satellite images was determined to be in the range of 52% to 75% in the testing data set that were acquired from variety of landforms like coastal islands of La Parguera, Chesapeake Bay, the Cuprite Mining District of Nevada, and agricultural field images of Kansas and Oklahoma, and thus, they can be used as a foundation for image matching and related image analysis tasks.