Application of spectral and spatial indices for specific class identification in Airborne Prism EXperiment (APEX) imaging spectrometer data for improved land cover classification

Hyperspectral remote sensing's ability to capture spectral information of targets in very narrow bandwidths gives rise to many intrinsic applications. However, the major limiting disadvantage to its applicability is its dimensionality, known as the Hughes Phenomenon. Traditional classification and image processing approaches fail to process data along many contiguous bands due to inadequate training samples. Another challenge of successful classification is to deal with the real world scenario of mixed pixels i.e. presence of more than one class within a single pixel. An attempt has been made to deal with the problems of dimensionality and mixed pixels, with an objective to improve the accuracy of class identification. In this paper, we discuss the application of indices to cope with the disadvantage of the dimensionality of the Airborne Prism EXperiment (APEX) hyperspectral Open Science Dataset (OSD) and to improve the classification accuracy using the Possibilistic c-Means (PCM) algorithm. This was used for the formulation of spectral and spatial indices to describe the information in the dataset in a lesser dimensionality. This reduced dimensionality is used for classification, attempting to improve the accuracy of determination of specific classes. Spectral indices are compiled from the spectral signatures of the target and spatial indices have been defined using texture analysis over defined neighbourhoods. The classification of 20 classes of varying spatial distributions was considered in order to evaluate the applicability of spectral and spatial indices in the extraction of specific class information. The classification of the dataset was performed in two stages; spectral and a combination of spectral and spatial indices individually as input for the PCM classifier. In addition to the reduction of entropy, while considering a spectral-spatial indices approach, an overall classification accuracy of 80.50% was achieved, against 65% (spectral indices only) and 59.50% (optimally determined principal components).