Hyperspectral band selection for soybean classification based on information measure in FRS theory

Soybeans and soy foods have attracted widespread attention due to their health benefits. Special varieties of soybeans are in demand from soybean processing enterprises. Because of the advantage of rapid measurement with minimal sample preparation, hyperspectral imaging technology is used for classifying soybean varieties. Based on fuzzy rough set (FRS) theory, the research of hyperspectral band selection can provide the foundation for variety classification. The performance of band selection with Gaussian membership functions and triangular membership functions under various parameters were explored. Appropriate ranges of parameters were determined by the number of bands and mutual information of subsets relative to the decision. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms was validated through experiments on soybean hyperspectral datasets by building two classification methods, namely Extreme Learning Machine and Random Forest. Compared with ranking methods, the proposed algorithm provides a promising improvement in classification accuracy by selecting highly informative bands. To further reduce the size of the subset, a post-pruning design was used. For the Gaussian membership function, a subset containing eight bands achieved an average accuracy of 99.11% after post-pruning. As well as classification accuracy, we explored stability of band selection algorithm under small perturbations. The band selection algorithm of the Gaussian membership function was more stable than that of the triangular membership function. The results showed that the information measure (IM) based band selection algorithm is effective at obtaining satisfactory classification accuracy and providing stable results under perturbations.