Clustering-Based Band Selection Using Structural Similarity Index and Entropy for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Received: 6 July 2020 Accepted: 15 October 2020 Despite the unique capabilities of hyperspectral images for classification tasks, handling the high dimension of these data is challenging. Therefore, dimension reduction algorithms have been proposed to solve this challenge. In this paper, an unsupervised Feature Selection (FS) algorithm was proposed for hyperspectral image classification. First, the entropy values of hyperspectral bands were employed to identify and remove noisy bands. Afterward, the Structural Similarity (SSIM) index and the k-means clustering algorithm were combined to select a few representative bands. Subsequently, the selected bands were injected into a supervised classifier, and the obtained Overall Accuracy (OA) and Kappa Coefficient (KC) were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Finally, the results were compared with the ones achieved from other well-known and state-of-the-art FS approaches. The results revealed that the proposed method outperformed other FS algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed FS algorithm obtained equal or higher OA and KC in comparison with the case of employing all hyperspectral bands. Additionally, a stability analysis step was performed to investigate the consistency of the proposed method. The results suggest the potential of the FS approach for hyperspectral image classification.