Band selection for hyperspectral images based on parallel particle swarm optimization schemes

Greedy modular eigenspaces (GME) has been developed for the band selection of hyperspectral images (HSI). GME attempts to greedily select uncorrelated feature sets from HSI. Unfortunately, GME is hard to find the optimal set by greedy operations except by exhaustive iterations. The long execution time has been the major drawback in practice. Accordingly, finding an optimal (or near-optimal) solution is very expensive. In this study we present a novel parallel mechanism, referred to as parallel particle swarm optimization (PPSO) band selection, to overcome this disadvantage. It makes use of a new particle swarm optimization scheme, a well-known method to solve the optimization problems, to develop an effective parallel feature extraction for HSI. The proposed PPSO improves the computational speed by using parallel computing techniques which include the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) of graphics processor unit (GPU), the message passing interface (MPI) and the open multi-processing (OpenMP) applications. These parallel implementations can fully utilize the significant parallelism of proposed PPSO to create a set of near-optimal GME modules on each parallel node. The experimental results demonstrated that PPSO can significantly improve the computational loads and provide a more reliable quality of solution compared to GME. The effectiveness of the proposed PPSO is evaluated by MODIS/ASTER airborne simulator (MASTER) HSI for band selection during the Pacrim II campaign.