Discarding–Recovering and Co-Evolution Mechanisms Based Evolutionary Algorithm for Hyperspectral Feature Selection

Abstract

With the improvement of spectral resolution, the redundant information in the hyperspectral imaging (HSI) datasets brings computational, analytical, and storage complexities. Feature selection is a combinatorial optimization problem, which selects a subset of feasible features to reduce the dimensionality of data and decrease the noise information. In recent years, the evolutionary algorithm (EA) has been widely used in feature selection, but the diversity of agents is lacking in the population, which leads to premature convergence. In this paper, a feature selection method based on discarding–recovering and co-evolution mechanisms is proposed with the aim of obtaining an effective feature combination in HSI datasets. The feature discarding mechanism is introduced to remove redundant information by roughly filtering the feature space. To further enhance the agents’ diversity, the reliable information interaction is also designed into the co-evolution mechanism, and if detects the event of stagnation, a subset of discarded features will be recovered using adaptive weights. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well on three public datasets, achieving an overall accuracy of 92.07%, 92.36%, and 98.01%, respectively, and obtaining the number of selected features between 15% and 25% of the total.