Identify important spectrum bands for classification using importances of wrapper selection applied to hyperspectral data

Intermediate results of two state-of-the-art wrapper feature selection approaches (GA and SFFS) applied to hyperspectral data sets were used to derive information about band importance for specific land cover classification problems. Several feature selection performance scores (classification accuracies, Bhattacharyya separability) were tested. The impact of the number of selected bands on classification accuracy was obtained thanks to SFFS, while a band importance measure was derived from intermediate sets of bands tested by GA. Such results are a first step toward the identification of the most suitable spectral bands to design superspectral camera systems dedicated to specific applications (e.g. classification of urban land cover and material maps).