Hyperspectral imagery transformations using real and imaginary features for improved classification

Several studies have reported that the use of derived spectral features, in addition to the original hyperspectral data, can facilitate the separation of similar classes. Linear and nonlinear transformations are employed to project data into mathematical spaces with the expectation that the decision surfaces separating similar classes become well defined. Therefore, the problem of discerning similar classes in expanded space becomes more tractable. Recent work presented by one of the authors discusses a dimension expansion technique based on generating real and imaginary complex features from the original hyperspectral signatures. A complex spectral angle mapper was employed to classify the data. In this paper, we extend this method to include other approaches that generate derivative-like and wavelet-based spectral features from the original data. These methods were tested with several supervised classification methods with two Hyperspectral Image (HSI) cubes.