A Novel Approach to the Selection of Robust and Invariant Features for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

This paper presents a novel approach to feature selection for the classification of hyperspectral images. The proposed approach aims at selecting a subset of the original set of features that exhibits two main properties:( i) high capability to discriminate among the considered classes, (ii) high invariance (stationarity) in the spatial domain of the investigated scene. The feature selection is accomplished by defining a multi-objective criterion that considers two terms: (i) a term that assesses the class separability, (ii) a term that evaluates the spatial invariance of the selected features. The multi-objective problem is solved by an evolutionary algorithm that estimates the Pareto-optimal solutions. Experiments carried out on a hyperspectral image acquired by the Hyperion sensor confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed technique.