Unsupervised hyperspectral feature selection based on fuzzy c-means and grey wolf optimizer

ABSTRACT Hyperspectral image (HSI) with hundreds of narrow and consecutive spectral bands provides substantial information to discriminate various land-covers. However, the existence of redundant features/bands not only gives rise to increasing of computation time but also interferes the classification result of hyperspectral images. Obviously, it is a very challenging problem how to select an effective feature subset from original bands to reduce the dimensionality of the hyperspectral dataset. In this study, a novel unsupervised feature selection method is suggested to remove the redundant features of HSI by feature subspace decomposition and optimization of feature combination. Feature subset decomposition is achieved by the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. The optimal feature selection is based on the optimization process of grey wolf optimizer (GWO) algorithm and maximum entropy (ME) principle. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on three well-known hyperspectral datasets, Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas. Six state-of-the-art feature selection methods are used to compare with the proposed method. Experimental results successfully confirm the superior performance of our proposal with respect to three classification accuracy indices overall accuracy (OA), average accuracy (AA) and kappa coefficient (κ).