Statistical Approach to Noisy Band Removal for Enhancement of HIRIS Image Classification

The accuracy of classifying pixels in HIRIS images is usually degraded by noisy bands since noisy bands may deform the typical shape of spectral reflectance. Proposed in this paper is a statistical method for noisy band removal which mainly makes use of the correlation coefficients between bands. Considering each band as a random variable, the correlation coefficient measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two random variables. While the correlation between two signal bands is high, existence of a noisy band will produce a low correlation due to ill-correlativeness and undirectedness. The application of the correlation coefficient as a measure for detecting noisy bands is under a two-pass screening scheme. This method is independent of the prior knowledge of the sensor or the cause resulted in the noise. The classification in this experiment uses the unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm in accordance with the well-accepted Euclidean distance measure and the spectral angle mapper measure. This paper also proposes a hierarchical combination of these measures for spectral matching. Finally, a separability assessment based on the between-class and within-class scatter matrices is followed to evaluate the performance.