Signal processing for hyperspectral image exploitation

Electro-optical remote sensing involves the acquisition of information about an object or scene without coming into physical contact with it. This is achieved by exploiting the fact that the materials comprising the various objects in a scene reflect, absorb, and emit electromagnetic radiation in ways characteristic of their molecular composition and shape. If the radiation arriving at the sensor is measured at each wavelength over a sufficiently broad spectral band, the resulting spectral signature, or simply spectrum, can be used (in principle) to uniquely characterize and identify any given material. An important function of hyperspectral signal processing is to eliminate the redundancy in the spectral and spatial sample data while preserving the high-quality features needed for detection, discrimination, and classification. This dimensionality reduction is implemented in a scene-dependent (adaptive) manner and may be implemented as a distinct step in the processing or as an integral part of the overall algorithm. The most widely used algorithm for dimensionality reduction is principal component analysis (PCA) or, equivalently, Karhunen-Loeve transformation.