On the influence of feature reduction for the classification of hyperspectral images based on the extended morphological profile

In this study we investigated the classification of hyperspectral data with high spatial resolution. Previously, methods that generate a so-called extended morphological profile (EMP) from the principal components of an image have been proposed to create base images for morphological transformations. However, it can be assumed that the feature reduction (FR) may have a significant effect on the accuracy of the classification of the EMP. We therefore investigated the effect of different FR methods on the generation and classification of the EMP of hyperspectral images from urban areas, using a machine learning-based algorithm for classification. The applied FR methods include: principal component analysis (PCA), nonparametric weighted feature extraction (NWFE), decision boundary feature extraction (DBFE), Gaussian kernel PCA (KPCA) and Bhattacharyya distance feature selection (BDFS). Experiments were run with two classification algorithms: the support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) algorithms. We demonstrate that the commonly used PCA approach seems to be nonoptimal in a large number of cases in terms of classification accuracy, and the other FR methods may be more suitable as preprocessing approaches for the EMP.