Quick Unsupervised Hyperspectral Dimensionality Reduction for Earth Observation: A Comparison

Dimensionality reduction can be applied to hyperspectral images so that the most useful data can be extracted and processed more quickly. This is critical in any situation in which data volume exceeds the capacity of the computational resources, particularly in the case of remote sensing platforms (e.g., drones, satellites), but also in the case of multi-year datasets. Moreover, the computational strategies of unsupervised dimensionality reduction often provide the basis for more complicated supervised techniques. In this work, eight unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithms are tested on hyperspectral data from the HYPSO-1 earth observation satellite. Each particular algorithm is chosen to be representative of a broader collection of methods. Our extensive experiments probe the computational complexity, reconstruction accuracy, signal clarity, sensitivity to artifacts, and effects on target detection and classification of the different algorithms. No algorithm consistently outperformed the others across all tests, but some general trends regarding the characteristics of the algorithms did emerge. With half a million pixels, computational time requirements of the methods varied by 5 orders of magnitude, and the reconstruction error varied by about 3 orders of magnitude. A relationship between mutual information and artifact susceptibility was suggested by the tests. The relative performance of the algorithms differed significantly between the target detection and classification tests. Overall, these experiments both show the power of dimensionality reduction and give guidance regarding how to evaluate a technique prior to incorporating it into a processing pipeline.