Segmentation-based truncated-SVD for effective feature extraction in hyperspectral image classification

Remote sensing hyperspectral images (HSIs) are rich sources of information about land cover captured across hundreds of narrow, contiguous spectral wavelength bands. However, using the entire original HSI for practical applications can lead to suboptimal classification accuracy. To address this, band reduction techniques, categorized as feature extraction and feature selection methods, are employed to enhance classification results. One commonly used feature extraction approach for HSIs is Principal Component Analysis (PCA). However, PCA may fall short of capturing the local and specific characteristics present in the HSI data. In this paper, we introduce two novel feature extraction methods: Segmented Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (STSVD) and Spectrally Segmented Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SSTSVD) to improve classification performance. Segmentation is carried out based on highly correlated bands' segments and spectral bands' segments within the HSI data. Our study evaluates and compares these newly proposed methods against classical feature extraction methods, including PCA, Incremental PCA, Sparse-PCA, Kernel PCA, Segmented-PCA (SPCA), and Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (TSVD). We perform this analysis on three distinct HSI datasets, namely the Indian Pines HSI, the Pavia University HSI, and the Kennedy Space Center HSI, using per-pixel Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classification. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods for all three datasets. The best-performing feature extraction methods when classification is performed using an SVM classifier are STSVD3 (89.03%), SSTSVD2 (95.55%), and STSVD3 (97.74%) for the Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Kennedy Space Center datasets, respectively. Similarly, for the RF classifier, the best-performing feature extraction methods are SSTSVD4 (88.98%), SSTSVD3 (96.04%), and SSTSVD4 (96.09%) for Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Kennedy Space Center datasets, respectively.