A band selection technique for spectral classification

In hyperspectral remote sensing, sensors acquire reflectance values at many different wavelength bands, to cover a complete spectral interval. These measurements are strongly correlated, and no new information might be added when increasing the spectral resolution. Moreover, the higher number of spectral bands increases the complexity of a classification task. Therefore, feature reduction is a crucial step. An alternative would be to choose the required sensor bands settings a priori. In this letter, we introduce a statistical procedure to provide band settings for a specific classification task. The proposed procedure selects wavelength band settings which optimize the separation between the different spectral classes. The method is applicable as a band reduction technique, but it can as well serve the purpose of data interpretation or be an aid in sensor design. Results on a vegetation classification task show an improvement in classification performance over feature selection and other band selection techniques.