DCT-Based Preprocessing Approach for ICA in Hyperspectral Data Analysis

The huge quantity of information and the high spectral resolution of hyperspectral imagery present a challenge when performing traditional processing techniques such as classification. Dimensionality and noise reduction improves both efficiency and accuracy, while retaining essential information. Among the many dimensionality reduction methods, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is one of the most popular techniques. However, ICA is computationally costly, and given the absence of specific criteria for component selection, constrains its application in high-dimension data analysis. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that applies Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) as preprocessing for ICA. Our method exploits the unique capacity of DCT to pack signal energy in few low-frequency coefficients, thus reducing noise and computation time. Subsequently, ICA is applied on this reduced data to make the output components as independent as possible for subsequent hyperspectral classification. To evaluate this novel approach, the reduced data using (1) ICA without preprocessing; (2) ICA with the commonly used preprocessing techniques which is Principal Component Analysis (PCA); and (3) ICA with DCT preprocessing are tested with Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) classifiers on two real hyperspectral datasets. Experimental results in both instances indicate that data after our proposed DCT preprocessing method combined with ICA yields superior hyperspectral classification accuracy.