Spectral-Spatial Genetic Algorithm-Based Unsupervised Band Selection for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Band selection (BS) can mitigate the “curse of dimensionality” problem and improve the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been applied to the task of hyperspectral BS showing significant advantages compared with other literature methods. However, the traditional GAs-based methods often select sets of bands having residual redundancy due to the large search space related to hyperspectral BS and the limitation of premature convergence in GAs. Moreover, existing GAs-based methods often are supervised, and that needs a large number of labeled samples to compute the fitness value for assessing the quality of selected bands. In this article, an unsupervised BS approach based on an improved GA is proposed. A fitness function based on the fisher score combined with superpixel is designed for evaluating the discriminability of band subsets considering both spectral and spatial information. Then, modified genetic operations are constructed to restrain the search space and reduce the redundancy of selected bands. The performance of the proposed spectral-spatial GA-based BS method is evaluated on three HSIs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the traditional GA-based method and seven state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.