Optimized Hyperspectral Band Selection Using Particle Swarm Optimization

A particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based system is proposed to select bands and determine the optimal number of bands to be selected simultaneously, which is near-automatic with only a few data-independent parameters. The proposed system includes two particle swarms, i.e., the outer one for estimating the optimal number of bands and the inner one for the corresponding band selection. To avoid employing an actual classifier within PSO so as to greatly reduce computational cost, criterion functions that can gauge class separability are preferred; specifically, minimum estimated abundance covariance (MEAC) and Jeffreys–Matusita (JM) distance are adopted in this research. The experimental results show that the 2PSO-based algorithm outperforms the popular sequential forward selection (SFS) method and PSO with one particle swarm in band selection.