Band Selection in Multispectral Images by Minimization of Dependent Information

In this paper, a band selection technique for hyperspectral image data is proposed. Supervised feature extraction techniques allow a reduction of the dimensionality to extract relevant features through a labeled training set. This implies an analysis of the existing class distributions, which usually means, in the case of hyperspectral imaging, a large number of samples, making the labeling process difficult. A possible alternative could be the use of information measures, which are the basis of the proposed method. The present approach basically behaves as an unsupervised feature selection criterion, to obtain the relevant spectral bands from a set of sample images. The relations of information content between spectral bands are analyzed, leading to the proposed technique based on the minimization of the dependent information between spectral bands, while trying to maximize the conditional entropies of the selected bands.