Spatial and Spectral Nonparametric Linear Feature Extraction Method for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Feature extraction (FE) or dimensionality reduction (DR) plays quite an important role in the field of pattern recognition. Feature extraction aims to reduce the dimensionality of the high-dimensional dataset to enhance the classification accuracy and foster the classification speed, particularly when the training sample size is small, namely the small sample size (SSS) problem. Remotely sensed hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often with hundreds of measured features (bands) which potentially provides more accurate and detailed information for classification, but it generally needs more samples to estimate parameters to achieve a satisfactory result. The cost of collecting ground-truth of remotely sensed hyperspectral scene can be considerably difficult and expensive. Therefore, FE techniques have been an important part for hyperspectral image classification. Unlike lots of feature extraction methods are based only on the spectral (band) information of the training samples, some feature extraction methods integrating both spatial and spectral information of training samples show more effective results in recent years. Spatial contexture information has been proven to be useful to improve the HSI data representation and to increase classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a spatial and spectral nonparametric linear feature extraction method for hyperspectral image classification. The spatial and spectral information is extracted for each training sample and used to design the within-class and between-class scatter matrices for constructing the feature extraction model. The experimental results on one benchmark hyperspectral image demonstrate that the proposed method obtains stable and satisfactory results than some existing spectral-based feature extraction.