Using a Feature Subset Selection method and Support Vector Machine to address curse of dimensionality and redundancy in Hyperion hyperspectral data classification

Abstract The curse of dimensionality resulted from insufficient training samples and redundancy is considered as an important problem in the supervised classification of hyperspectral data. This problem can be handled by Feature Subset Selection (FSS) methods and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The FSS methods can manage the redundancy by removing redundant spectral bands. Moreover, kernel based methods, especially SVM have a high ability to classify limited-sample data sets. This paper mainly aims to assess the capability of a FSS method and the SVM in curse of dimensional circumstances and to compare results with the Artificial Neural Network (ANN), when they are used to classify alteration zones of the Hyperion hyperspectral image acquired from the greatest Iranian porphyry copper complex. The results demonstrated that by decreasing training samples, the accuracy of SVM was just decreased 1.8% while the accuracy of ANN was highly reduced i.e. 14.01%. In addition, a hybrid FSS was applied to reduce the dimension of Hyperion. Accordingly, among the 165 useable spectral bands of Hyperion, 18 bands were only selected as the most important and informative bands. Although this dimensionality reduction could not intensively improve the performance of SVM, ANN revealed a significant improvement in the computational time and a slightly enhancement in the average accuracy. Therefore, SVM as a low-sensitive method respect to the size of training data set and feature space can be applied to classify the curse of dimensional problems. Also, the FSS methods can improve the performance of non-kernel based classifiers by eliminating redundant features.