A Geometry-Based Band Selection Approach for Hyperspectral Image Analysis

Band selection (BS) is a special case of the feature selection problem, and it tries to remove redundant bands and select a few informative and distinctive bands to represent the whole image cube. The maximum ellipsoid volume (MEV) method regards the band subset with the maximum volume as the optimal band combination. However, the MEV method cannot be directly applied for hyperspectral imagery due to the high dimensionality of the data sets. Therefore, we first combine MEV with the sequential forward search (SFS) and propose a new unsupervised BS method called MEV-SFS. Furthermore, a subtle relationship between the ellipsoid volume of the band set and the orthogonal projections (OPs) of the candidate bands is observed. Based on this relationship, we propose another equivalent method, namely, the OP-based BS (OPBS) method. OPBS is the fast version of MEV-SFS, and it has a better computational efficiency and the potential to determine the number of bands to be selected. We specifically explain the rationality of the MEV-based methods (MEV-SFS and OPBS) and illustrate their theoretical significance and physical meaning from different aspects. Theoretical analysis also demonstrates that OPBS can be regarded as a model or framework for BS, and thus, we further propose a third novel BS method named the OPBS-information divergence (OPBS-ID) method, which is a variant of OPBS. OPBS-ID can achieve a better classification performance than OPBS in many cases. Experimental results on different hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that the proposed methods have high computational efficiency, and the selected bands can achieve satisfactory classification performances.