Morphological principal component analysis for hyperspectral image analysis

This article deals with the issue of reducing the spectral dimension of a hyperspectral image using principal component analysis (PCA). To perform this dimensionality reduction, we propose the addition of spatial information in order to improve the features that are extracted. Several approaches proposed to add spatial information are discussed in this article. They are based on mathematical morphology operators. These morphological operators are the area opening/closing, granulometries and grey-scale distance function. We name the proposed family of techniques the Morphological Principal Component Analysis (MorphPCA). Present approaches provide new feature spaces able to jointly handle the spatial and spectral information of hyperspectral images. They are computationally simple since the key element is the computation of an empirical covariance matrix which integrates simultaneously both spatial and spectral information. The performance of the different feature spaces is assessed for different tasks in order to prove their practical interest.