Feature Selection for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Image Classification via Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) generally contain a large amount of spectral bands (features), and the redundant information in them will cause the Hughes phenomenon in the classification process. And feature extraction and feature selection are the two main existing methods to effectively reduce the redundancy of spectral information in the field of HSIs classification. Compared with feature extraction methods, feature selection methods can preserve most of the features of the original HSIs data without losing their valuable details. However, most existing feature selection methods based on single scene (domain) perform poorly in some scenes (domains) with insufficient labeled samples. Therefore, how to adopt an efficient feature selection method to select the optimal feature subsets of source scene and target scene and use the sample information of source scene to assist in the classification of target scene so as to improve the classification accuracy of images in the target scene as much as possible is still very challenging. In order to solve the above problem, this paper proposes a new cross-scene algorithm: Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm-Based Cross-Scene Feature Selection Algorithm (IMACO-CSFS). In order to obtain more accurate feature subsets of the two scenes, IMACO-CSFS proposes a priority sorting-based ant colony strategy to make the subsequent search process focus on the global optimal solution (optimal feature subset) found in the previous iteration. In addition, in order to further accelerate the convergence speed of the global optimal solution, an ant colony strategy based on elite ants is proposed in IMACO-CSFS to more efficiently obtain the optimal feature subsets of the two scenes for training the classifier. Furthermore, this paper simultaneously considers overall classification accuracies of the optimal feature subsets for both scenes and dynamically adjusts their scale to ensure the consistency of the selected features between the two scenes, attenuating the effect of spectral shift and achieving the higher image classification accuracy in the target scene. Experimental results on three cross-scene HSI data pairs demonstrate that IMACO-CSFS is superior in cross-scene feature selection and cross-scene HSIs classification.