Hyperspectral band clustering and band selection for urban land cover classification

The aim of this study is to combine band clustering with band selection for dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral imagery. The performance of dimensionality reduction is evaluated through urban land cover classification accuracy with the dimensionality-reduced data. Different from unsupervised clustering using all the pixels or supervised clustering requiring labelled pixels, the discussed semi-supervised band clustering needs class spectral signatures only; band selection result is used as initial condition for band clustering; after clustering, a cluster selection step is applied to select clusters to be used in the following data analysis. In this article, we propose to conduct band selection by removing outlier bands in each cluster before finalizing cluster centres. The experimental results in urban land cover classification show that the proposed algorithm can further enhance support vector machine (SVM)-based classification accuracy.