A Study on the Unsupervised Classification of Hyperion and ETM+ Data Using Spectral Angle and Unit Vector

Unsupervised classification is an important area of research in image processing because supervised classification has the disadvantages such as long task-training time and high cost and low objectivity in training information. This paper focuses on unsupervised classification, which can extract ground object information with the minimum 'Spectral Angle Distance' operation on be behalf of 'Spectral Euclidian Distance' in the clustering process. Unlike previous studies, our algorithm uses the unit vector, not the spectral distance, to compute the cluster mean, and the Single-Pass algorithm automatically determines the seed points. Atmospheric correction for more accurate results was adapted on the Hyperion data and the results were analyzed. We applied the algorithm to the Hyperion and ETM+ data and compared the results with K-Means and the former USAM algorithm. From the result, USAM classified the water and dark forest area well and gave more accurate results than K-Means, so we believe that the 'Spectral Angle' can be one of the most accurate classifiers of not only multispectral images but hyperspectral images. And also the unit vector can be an efficient technique for characterizing the Remote Sensing data.