August 10, 2010 / Vol. 8, No. 8 / CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS 811
Hyperspectral feature recognition based on kernel PCA and
relational perspective map
Hongjun Su (ùùù) and Yehua Sheng (uuu)
∗
Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Ministry of Education),
Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210046, China
∗
E-mail: shengyehua@njnu.edu.cn
Received February 26, 2010
A novel joint kernel principal component analysis (PCA) and relational perspective map (RPM) method
called KPmapper is proposed for hyperspectral dimensionality reduction and spectral feature recognition.
Kernel PCA is used to analyze hyperspectral data so that the major information corresponding to features
can be better extracted. RPM is used to visualize hyperspectral data through two-dimensional (2D) maps,
and it is an efficient approach to discover regularities and extract information by partitioning the data into
pieces and mapping them onto a 2D space. The experimental results prove that the KPmapper algorithm
can effectively obtain the intrinsic features in nonlinear high dimensional data. It is useful and impressing
for dimensionality reduction and spectral feature recognition.
OCIS co des: 100.5010, 280.4788, 300.6170.
doi: 10.3788/COL20100808.0811.
Hyperspectral data can provide fine and detailed spec-
tral information by contiguous spectral range and nar-
row spectrum interval. As a result, some important
and typical spectral features that cannot be expressed
in broadband remote sensed data will be revealed and
extracted obviously, which is significant to target identi-
fication, endmember extraction, anomaly diagnosis, fine
classification, and sophisticated applications of remote
sensing
[1−3]
. But for the given spectra acquired from field
measurement with spectrometer or pixels on hyperspec-
tral remote sensing image by aerial or spaceborne sensors,
how to extract those significant features that can char-
acterize the objects is still the most important topic for
hyperspectral applications. Two critical issues arise from
the above situations. One is “Hughes phenomenon”
[4]
caused by high dimensionality; the other is spectral fea-
ture recognition.
Dimensionality reduction (DR) is the approach to elim-
inate the impact of “Hughes phenomenon”. Gener-
ally speaking, there are two kinds of DR approaches:
one is band selection that selects some interesting
bands or those bands with more information and
weak inter-correlations; the other is feature extrac-
tion, which compresses all bands by certain mathematic
transformation
[5]
. In the past few years, many DR
methods have been presented in remote sensing with
linear techniques such as principal component analysis
(PCA)
[6]
, linear discriminant analysis (LDA)
[7]
, indepen-
dent component analysis (ICA)
[8]
, and so on. However,
the nonlinear features which can be the major properties
in spectral space for hyperspectral data are ignored.
On the other hand, different methods to extract char-
acteristic spectral features have been researched in the
recent years
[9,10]
. Manifold learning, as a new approach,
has been applied to high dimensional data
[11,12]
, and it
can model the nonlinear features (manifold) of high di-
mensional data, while the nonlinear properties are well
preserved. Such manifold learning algorithms as kernel
PCA (KPCA)
[13]
, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)
[14]
,
isometric mapping (ISOMAP)
[11]
, diffusion maps
[15]
, lo-
cal linear embedding
[12,16]
, Laplacian eigenmap
[17]
, and
local tangent space alignment
[18]
have devoted to pattern
recognition and machine learning while ignoring their ap-
plications in hyperspectral remote sensing. In fact, those
manifold learning algorithms are able to efficiently reveal
geometrical structures and regularities which indwell in
high dimensional space from hyperspectral data
[19]
. In
this letter, a novel joint KPCA and relational perspec-
tive map (RPM) method called KPmapper for DR and
spectral feature recognition is proposed. Experiments are
designed to validate the performance of the proposed al-
gorithm.
PCA is one of the classic linear algorithms in pattern
recognition
[6]
. Its nonlinear version, KPCA, is used to
deal with hyperspectral data in this letter. The details
of KPCA algorithm can be found in Ref. [13]. Sup-
pose that there is a dataset of centered random vector
X ∈ R
n
with N observations x
i
, i ∈ [1, · · · , N]. Firstly,
we mapped the data onto another dot product space Q
d
by φ : R
n
→ Q
d
, X → φ(X). The covariance matrix
φ(X) can be defined as C
φ(X )
=
1
N
N
P
i=1
φ(x
i
)φ(x
i
)
T
. Let
v ∈ Q
d
(v 6= 0) be an eigenvector of C
φ(X)
that corre-
sponds to a positive eigenvalue λ of C
φ(X)
. Similar to
PCA, we can get
λv = C
φ(X )
v, (1)
where v =
N
P
i=1
α
i
φ(x
i
) is lying in the span of
{φ(x
1
), φ(x
2
), · · · , φ(x
N
)}. In addition, by multiplying
Eq. (1) with φ(x
k
) from the left and substituting the
value of v into it, we can get λφ(x)· v
k
= φ(x)·C
φ(x)
·v
k
,
where v
k
=
N
P
i=1
α
k
i
φ(x
i
), k ∈ [1, N ]. In order to construct
the kernel function, we defined an N × N matrix K as
K
i,j
= φ(x
i
) · φ(x
j
) = k(x
i
, x
j
). Consider an eigenvalue
1671-7694/2010/080811-04
c
° 2010 Chinese Optics Letters