A Novel Approach for Dimensionality Reduction and Classification of Hyperspectral Images based on Normalized Synergy

During the last decade, hyperspectral images have attracted increasing interest from researchers worldwide. They provide more detailed information about an observed area and allow an accurate target detection and precise discrimination of objects compared to classical RGB and multispectral images. Despite the great potentialities of hyperspectral technology, the analysis and exploitation of the large volume data remain a challenging task. The existence of irrelevant redundant and noisy images decreases the classification accuracy. As a result, dimensionality reduction is a mandatory step in order to select a minimal and effective images subset. In this paper, a new filter approach normalized mutual synergy (NMS) is proposed in order to detect relevant bands that are complementary in the class prediction better than the original hyperspectral cube data. The algorithm consists of two steps: images selection through normalized synergy information and pixel classification. The proposed approach measures the discriminative power of the selected bands based on a combination of their maximal normalized synergic information, minimum redundancy and maximal mutual information with the ground truth. A comparative study using the support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifiers is conducted to evaluate the proposed approach compared to the state of art band selection methods. Experimental results on three benchmark hyperspectral images proposed by the NASA "Aviris Indiana Pine", "Salinas" and "Pavia University" demonstrated the robustness, effectiveness and the discriminative power of the proposed approach over the literature approaches. Keywords: Hyperspectral images; target detection; pixel classification; dimensionality reduction; band selection; information theory; mutual information; normalized synergy