Assessment of Component Selection Strategies in Hyperspectral Imagery

Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) integrates many continuous and narrow bands that cover different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, the main challenge is the high dimensionality of HSI data due to the ’Hughes’ phenomenon. Thus, dimensionality reduction is necessary before applying classification algorithms to obtain accurate thematic maps. We focus the study on the following feature-extraction algorithms: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF), and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). After a literature survey, we have observed a lack of a comparative study on these techniques as well as accurate strategies to determine the number of components. Hence, the first objective was to compare traditional dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, MNF, and ICA) in HSI of the Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) sensor and to evaluate different strategies for selecting the most suitable number of components in the transformed space. The second objective was to determine a new dimensionality reduction approach by dividing the CASI HSI regarding the spectral regions covering the electromagnetic spectrum. The components selected from the transformed space of the different spectral regions were stacked. This stacked transformed space was evaluated to see if the proposed approach improves the final classification.