Band elimination of hyperspectral imagery using partitioned band image correlation and capacitory discrimination

Due to the very large number of bands in hyperspectral imagery, two major problems which arise during classification are the ‘curse of dimensionality’ and computational complexity. To overcome these, dimensionality reduction is an important task for hyperspectral image analysis. An unsupervised band elimination method is proposed which iteratively eliminates one band from the pair of most correlated neighbouring bands depending on the discriminating capability of the bands. Correlation between neighbouring bands is calculated over partitioned band images. Capacitory discrimination is used to measure the discrimination capability of a band image. Finally, four evaluation measures, namely classification accuracy, kappa coefficient, class separability, and entropy are calculated over the selected bands to measure the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed unsupervised band elimination technique is compared to three popular state-of-the-art approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and shows promising results compared to them.