Similarity-Based Unsupervised Band Selection for Hyperspectral Image Analysis

Band selection is a common approach to reduce the data dimensionality of hyperspectral imagery. It extracts several bands of importance in some sense by taking advantage of high spectral correlation. Driven by detection or classification accuracy, one would expect that, using a subset of original bands, the accuracy is unchanged or tolerably degraded, whereas computational burden is significantly relaxed. When the desired object information is known, this task can be achieved by finding the bands that contain the most information about these objects. When the desired object information is unknown, i.e., unsupervised band selection, the objective is to select the most distinctive and informative bands. It is expected that these bands can provide an overall satisfactory detection and classification performance. In this letter, we propose unsupervised band selection algorithms based on band similarity measurement. The experimental result shows that our approach can yield a better result in terms of information conservation and class separability than other widely used techniques.