Elsevier

Applied Soft Computing

Volume 5, Issue 2, January 2005, Pages 147-156
Applied Soft Computing

Hyperspectral image analysis using genetic programming

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2004.06.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Genetic programming is used to evolve mineral identification functions for hyperspectral images. The input image set comprises 168 images from different wavelengths ranging from 428 nm (visible blue) to 2507 nm (invisible shortwave in the infrared), taken over Cuprite, Nevada, with the AVIRIS hyperspectral sensor. A composite mineral image indicating the overall reflectance percentage of three minerals (alunite, kaolnite, buddingtonite) is used as a reference or “solution” image. The training set is manually selected from this composite image, and results are cross-validated with the remaining image data not used for training. The task of the GP system is to evolve mineral identifiers, where each identifier is trained to identify one of the three mineral specimens. A number of different GP experiments were undertaken, which parameterized features such as thresholded mineral reflectance intensity and target GP language. The results are promising, especially for minerals with higher reflectance thresholds, which indicate more intense concentrations.

Introduction

Remote sensing using aircraft and satellite photography is well-established technology. The use of hyperspectral imagery, however, is relatively new. Hyperspectral images are capable of precisely capturing narrow bands of spectra through a wide range of wavelengths. Since many organic and inorganic materials exhibit unique absorption and reflection characteristics at particular bandwidths, these spectra are useful for remotely identifying various materials and phenomena of interest. This is an important area of work, since hyperspectral data permits the discovery of valuable natural resources in areas largely inaccessible by foot. Literally any area of the Earth can be mapped by hyperspectral imagery, be it with aircraft or satellites.

One complication in using this technology is the time and expertise required to interpret the data. Hyperspectral imaging systems such as the NASA/JPL AVIRIS1 sensor can capture over 200 bandwidths for a single geographic location [8]. This is denoted by a hyperspectral cube, which takes the form of many hundreds of mega-bytes of information. Interpreting this massive amount of data is difficult, especially considering that the spectra obtained represent mixed spectral signatures of a variety of materials. Moreover, noise and other unwanted effects must be considered. Deciphering this enormous volume of cryptic data is therefore next to impossible for humans to do manually.

This paper uses genetic programming (GP) to evolve mineral classifiers for use on hyperspectral images. Separate mineral classifiers are evolved for three specific minerals—buddingtonite, alunite, and kaolinite. The classifiers take the form of programs which, when given a vector of data from a particular pixel location on a hyperspectral cube, determine whether the mineral of interest resides there or not. Evolution proceeds by evaluating the performance of classifiers on positive and negative training sets. In addition, given the effects of noise at low reflectance levels, separate threshold stages are examined. This is done to investigate whether more accurate classification arises at higher reflectance levels, where there are more intense mineral concentrations.

Section 2 reviews concepts in hyperspectral imaging. The experimental design is outlined in Section 3. Section 4 presents the results of the experiments. A discussion and comparison to related research concludes the paper in Section 5.

Section snippets

Background

The AVIRIS data used in this study was taken over Cuprite, Nevada on June 12, 1996 (19:31UT). The sensor acquires data in the wavelength region from 0.38 to 2.50 μm, with a ground sampling interval of 16.2 m across track (horizontal) and 18.1 m along track (vertical). At-sensor radiance data were converted to surface reflectance via an atmospheric correction using the MODTRAN3 radiative transfer (RT) code, as implemented in the imaging spectrometer data analysis system (ISDAS) [19]. This removes

Hyperspectral data preparation

The reflectance data from Cuprite derived from the AVIRIS hyperspectral data set was analyzed by [14]. The mineral fraction maps which resulted from their work are used as the training solution for this study. From the full AVIRIS bandset available, we started with data at 0.428 μm and eliminated bands near 1.4 and 1.9, where strong absorption in the atmosphere occurs due to water vapour. This left 168 bands of data as input for our GP experiment.

Training set sampling

The general goal is to evolve a separate

Results

Table 4 shows the training and testing performances for the GP runs. Every mineral and threshold experiment combines the results for 30 runs (three target languages, 10 runs per language). Cross-validation is performed on the testing set, which is the remainder of the input data excluding the training pixels. The testing “avg overall” value denotes the overall classification performance of the single best solution from each run, averaged for all 30 runs. The performance of the single best

Conclusion

The hyperspectral mineral identifiers evolved by GP work quite differently from conventional approaches. With least-squares spectra fitting, signature spectra for materials of interest are fitted to the hyperspectral values at each pixel on the map [4]. Identification entails exaggerating the signature differences between materials, and looking for such fluctuations in the hyperspectral data. Our system evolves classifiers that use spectral characteristics directly from the hyperspectral data

Acknowledgement

Thanks to anonymous referees for their constructive comments. This research is supported through NSERC Operating Grants 138467 and 0046210, and an NSERC USRA grant.

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