Band Selection and Dimension Estimation for Hyperspectral Imagery—a New Approach Based on Invasive Weed Optimization

Currently, hyperspectral images have potential applications in many scientific areas due to the high spectral resolution. Extracting suitable and adequate bands/features from high dimensional data is a crucial task to classify such data. To overcome this issue, dimension reduction techniques have direct effects to improve the efficiency of classifiers on hyperspectral images. One common approach for decreasing the dimensionality is the feature/band selection by considering the optimum dimensionality of the hyperspectral imagery. In this paper, a new method was proposed to select optimal band for classification application, based on a metaheuristic Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) algorithm. In this regard, the K-nearest neighbour (K-NN) technique was used as the classifier. Moreover, as a by-product of our band selection method, a new method was proposed to estimate an optimum dimension of the reduced hyperspectral images for better classification. Experimental results over three real-world hyperspectral datasets clearly showed that the proposed IWO-based band selection algorithm of this study led to the significant progress in selecting suitable bands for classification applications and estimation of optimum dimensionality of these datasets. In this regard, the overall accuracy (OA) of classification of the proposed IWO-based band selection algorithm was 92.02, 93.57, and 89.72 % for each dataset, respectively. Moreover, results reveal the superiority of the proposed IWO-based band selection algorithm against the other algorithms including GA, SA, ACO, and PSO for band selection purpose.