On the Influence of Spatial Information for Hyper-spectral Satellite Imaging Characterization

Land-use classification for hyper-spectral satellite images requires a previous step of pixel characterization. In the easiest case, each pixel is characterized by its spectral curve. The improvement of the spectral and spatial resolution in hyper-spectral sensors has led to very large data sets. Some researches have focused on better classifiers that can handle big amounts of data. Others have faced the problem of band selection to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space. However, thanks to the improvement in the spatial resolution of the sensors, spatial information may also provide new features for hyper-spectral satellite data. Here, an study on the influence of spectral-spatial features combined with an unsupervised band selection method is presented. The results show that it is possible to reduce very significantly the number of spectral bands required while having an adequate description of the spectral-spatial characteristics of the image for pixel classification tasks.