Salient Band Selection for Hyperspectral Image Classification via Manifold Ranking

Saliency detection has been a hot topic in recent years, and many efforts have been devoted in this area. Unfortunately, the results of saliency detection can hardly be utilized in general applications. The primary reason, we think, is unspecific definition of salient objects, which makes that the previously published methods cannot extend to practical applications. To solve this problem, we claim that saliency should be defined in a context and the salient band selection in hyperspectral image (HSI) is introduced as an example. Unfortunately, the traditional salient band selection methods suffer from the problem of inappropriate measurement of band difference. To tackle this problem, we propose to eliminate the drawbacks of traditional salient band selection methods by manifold ranking. It puts the band vectors in the more accurate manifold space and treats the saliency problem from a novel ranking perspective, which is considered to be the main contributions of this paper. To justify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on three HSIs, and our method is compared with the six existing competitors. Results show that the proposed method is very effective and can achieve the best performance among the competitors.