Band selection for hyperspectral images based on impurity function

Band selection for hyperspectral images is an effective technique to mitigate the curse of dimensionality. A variety of band selection methods have been suggested in the past. This paper presents a novel band prioritization based on impurity function (IF) for the band selection of hyperspectral images. The proposed IF band selection (IFBS) is incorporated with particle swarm optimization (PSO) band selection which has been developed to effectively group highly correlated bands of hyperspectral images into high corrected modules. It uses a particle swarm optimization scheme, which is a well-known method to solve the optimization problems, to develop an effective feature extraction algorithm for hyperspectral imagery. After PSO method is applied to the band reduction of hyperspectral images, the proposed IFBS is applied to enhance the efficiency of band selection. The propose method is evaluated by MODIS/ASTER airborne simulator (MASTER) for land cover classification during the Pacrim II campaign. The performance of IFBS is validated by the supervised k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IFBS approach is an effective method for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction. Compared to other band selection methods, IFBS can effectively select the most significant bands for the image classification of hyperspectral images.