A Review of Unsupervised Band Selection Techniques: Land Cover Classification for Hyperspectral Earth Observation Data

A hyperspectral image (HSI) is a collection of several narrow-band images that span a wide spectral range. Each band reflects the same scene, composed of various objects imaged at different wavelengths; the spatial information, however, remains generally consistent across bands. Both types of information, spectral and spatial, can be leveraged to identify and classify objects. Recently, the use of machine learning (ML) in object classification has become increasingly widespread. Regardless of the selected approach, object-specific spectral and spatial information is key to discriminating relevant categories. Whereas spatial information is usually repeated across bands, spectral information tends to be distributed more unevenly and often highly so. This poses the issue of removing redundancy, which is commonly called the band selection (BS) problem and refers to identifying an optimal subset of bands for further HSI processing.