Superpixel-Based Unsupervised Band Selection for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

This paper presents an unsupervised approach to band selection in hyperspectral images that considers both spectral and spatial information in data dimensionality reduction. The approach exploits the concepts of superpixel and chunklets for identifying the spectral channels most suitable to be used in classification for discriminating land-cover classes. The segmented superpixels can be regarded as many small spectral homogeneous and spatial neighboring pixel chunklets. Based on the observation that the superpixel chunklets achieve high homogeneity and consistency within land-cover classes, a series of band criteria (BC) is identified by learning the optimal band transformation that results in low within-class variability and high total variability. Then, the learned BC, which are called band measures, are given in input to an efficient clustering algorithm, i.e., the affinity propagation, for selecting highly separable bands with low redundancy. The effectiveness of proposed approach was assessed on three hyperspectral data sets. The results point out the advantages of the proposed methods over five state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.