Spectral transformation based on nonlinear principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral images

Managing transmission and storage of hyperspectral (HS) images can be extremely difficult. Thus, the dimensionality reduction of HS data becomes necessary. Among several dimensionality reduction techniques, transform-based have found to be effective for HS data. While spatial transformation techniques provide good compression rates, the choice of the spectral decorrelation approaches can have strong impact on the quality of the compressed image. Since HS images are highly correlated within each spectral band and in particular across neighboring bands, the choice of a decorrelation method allowing to retain as much information content as possible is desirable. From this point of view, several methods based on PCA and Wavelet have been presented in the literature. In this paper, we propose the use of NLPCA transform as a method to reduce the spectral dimensionality of HS data. NLPCA represents in a lower dimensional space the same information content with less features than PCA. In these terms, aim of this research is focused on the analysis of the results obtained through the spectral decorrelation phase rather than taking advantage of both spectral and spatial compression. Experimental results assessing the advantage of NLPCA with respect to standard PCA are presented on four different HS datasets.