Create the relevant spatial filterbank in the hyperspectral jungle

Inclusion of spatial information is known to be beneficial to the classification of hyperspectral images. However, given the high dimensionality of the data, it is difficult to know before hand which are the bands to filter or what are the filters to be applied. In this paper, we propose an active set algorithm based on a l₁ support vector machine that explores the (possibility infinite) space of spatial filters and retrieves automatically the filters that maximize class separation. Experiments on hyperspectral imagery confirms the power of the method, that reaches state of the art performance with small feature sets generated automatically and without prior knowledge.