International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B7, 2012
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia
COMPARISOM OF WAVELET-BASED AND HHT-BASED FEATURE EXTRACTION METHODS
FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION
X.-M. Huang * and P.-H. Hsu *
* Dept. of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei City 10617, Taiwan —
(r98521116, hsuph)@ntu.edu.tw
Commission VII, WG VII/3
KEY WORDS: Hyperspectral Image, Feature Extraction, Classification, Wavelet Transform, Hilbert-Huang Transform
ABSTRACT:
Hyperspectral images, which contain rich and fine spectral information, can be used to identify surface objects and improve land
use/cover classification accuracy. Due to the property of high dimensionality of hyperspectral data, traditional statistics-based
classifiers cannot be directly used on such images with limited training samples. This problem is referred as “curse of
dimensionality.” The commonly used method to solve this problem is dimensionality reduction, and feature extraction is used to
reduce the dimensionality of hyperspectral images more frequently. There are two types of feature extraction methods. The first type
is based on statistical property of data. The other type is based on time-frequency analysis. In this study, the time-frequency analysis
methods are used to extract the features for hyperspectral image classification. Firstly, it has been proven that wavelet-based feature
extraction provide an effective tool for spectral feature extraction. On the other hand, Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT), a relative new
time-frequency analysis tool, has been widely used in nonlinear and nonstationary data analysis. In this study, wavelet transform and
HHT are implemented on the hyperspectral data for physical spectral analysis. Therefore, we can get a small number of salient
features, reduce the dimensionality of hyperspectral images and keep the accuracy of classification results. An AVIRIS data set is
used to test the performance of the proposed HHT-based feature extraction methods; then, the results are compared with wavelet-
based feature extraction. According to the experiment results, HHT-based feature extraction methods are effective tools and the
results are similar with wavelet-based feature extraction methods.
1. INTRODUCTION
Imaging spectrometer, a technology which was developed in
1980's, can obtain hundreds of spectral bands simultaneously
(Goetz et al, 1985). The images acquired with spectrometers
are called as hyperspectral images. These images not only re-
veal two-dimensional spatial information but also contain rich
and fine spectral information. With these characteristics, they
can be used to identify surface objects and improve land
use/cover classification accuracies. In past three decades, hy-
perspectral images have been widely used in different fields
such as mineral identification, vegetation mapping, and disaster
investigation (Goetz et al., 1985).
Because hyperspectral data have the property of high dimen-
sionality, image processing methods which have been effective-
ly applied to multispectral data in the past are not as proper as
to hyperspectral data. For instance, it is ineffective when the
traditional statistical classification methods are applied to hy-
perspectral images with limited training samples. In other words,
the dimensionality increases with the number of bands, the
number of training samples for classification should be in-
creased as well (Hsu, 2007). This has been termed the “curse of
dimensionality” by Bellman (1961). The commonly used meth-
od to solve “curse of dimensionality” is dimensionality reduc-
tion, which can be divided into two types: feature selection and
feature extraction. For hyperspectral images, feature extraction
is used to reduce the dimensionality more frequently (Hsu,
2003).
Corresponding author.
There are two types of feature extraction methods. The first type
is based on the statistical property of data. For instance, princi-
pal components transform (PCT) is the most commonly used
and simple method. Although it concerns the distribution of
whole data, some useful features for hyperspectral data will be
neglected easily. Discriminant analysis feature extraction
(DAFE) is to maximize the between-class scatter and minimize
the within-class scatter. Moreover, decision boundary feature
extraction (DBFE), which was proposed by Lee and Landgrebe
(1993), could find useful features by decision boundaries be-
tween different classes. Although DAFE and DBFE are effec-
tive and practical algorithms, there are some disadvantages. For
example, the maximum number of feature in DAFE is the num-
ber of class minus one. Besides, in order to get reliable parame-
ters in DAFE or to compute the decision boundaries in DBFE,
it still needs adequate training samples (Fukunaga, 1990; Lee
and Landgrebe, 1993).
The other type of feature extraction methods is based on time-
frequency analysis. For example, it has been proven that wave-
let-based feature extraction provide an appropriate and effective
tool for spectral feature extraction (Hsu, 2003). However, this
method has some disadvantages; for instance, it has to select the
wavelet basis function in advance, or it is not suitable for non-
linear data analysis. Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is a rela-
tively new adaptive time-frequency analysis tool. It combines
empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert spectral
analysis (HSA), and has been used extensively in nonlinear and
nonstationary data analysis. In this study, the wavelet transform
and HHT are implemented on the hyperspectral data for physi-
cally spectral analysis. The spectral features are then extracted
