Advanced Spectral and Spatial Techniques for Hyperspectral Image Analysis and Classification

Recent advances in sensor technology have led to an increased availability of hyperspectral remote sensing images with high spectral and spatial resolutions. These images are composed by hundreds of contiguous spectral channels, covering a wide spectral range of frequencies, in which each pixel contains a highly detailed representation of the reflectance of the materials present on the ground, and a better characterization in terms of geometrical detail. The burst of informative content conveyed in the hyperspectral images permits an improved characterization of different land coverages. In spite of that, it increases significantly the complexity of the analysis, introducing a series of challenges that need to be addressed, such as the computational complexity and resources required. This dissertation aims at defining novel strategies for the analysis and classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images, placing the focal point on the investigation and optimisation techniques for the extraction and integration of spectral and spatial information. In the first part of the thesis, a thorough study on the analysis of the spectral information contained in the hyperspectral images is presented. Though, independent component analysis (ICA) has been widely used to address several tasks in the remote sensing field, such as feature reduction, spectral unmixing and classification, its employment in extracting class-discriminant information remains a research topic open to further investigation. To this extend, a profound study on the performances of different ICA algorithms is performed, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in the hyperspectral image classification task. Based on this study, a novel approach for feature reduction is proposed, where the use of ICA is optimised for the extraction of class-specific information. In the second part of the thesis, the spatial information is exploited by employing operators from the mathematical morphology framework. Morphological operators, such as attribute profiles and their multi-channel and multi-attribute extensions, are proved to be effective in the modelling of the spatial information, dealing, however, with issues such as the high feature dimensionality, the high intrinsic information redundancy and the a-priori need for parameter tuning in filtering, which are still open. Addressing the first two issues, the reduced attribute profiles are introduced, in this thesis, as an optimised version of the morphological attribute profiles, with the property to compress all the meaningful geometrical information into a few features. Regarding the filter parameter tuning issue, an innovative strategy for automatic threshold selection is proposed. Inspired by the concept of granulometry, the proposed approach defines a novel granulometric characteristic function, which provides information on the image decomposition according to a given measure. The approach exploits the tree representation of an image, allowing us to avoid additional filtering steps prior to the threshold selection, making the process computationally effective. The outcome of this dissertation advances the state-of-the-art by proposing novel methodologies for accurate hyperspectral image classification, where the results obtained by extensive experimentation on various real hyperspectral data sets confirmed their effectiveness. Concluding the thesis, insightful and concrete remarks to the aforementioned issues are discussed.