Compressive sensing and adaptive direct sampling in hyperspectral imaging

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is an emerging technique, which provides the continuous acquisition of electro-magnetic waves, usually covering the visible as well as the infrared light range. Many materials can be easily discriminated by means of their spectra rendering HSI an interesting method for the reliable classification of contents in a scene. Due to the high amount of data generated by HSI, effective compression algorithms are required. The computational complexity as well as the potentially high number of sensors render HSI an expensive technology. It is thus of practical interest to reduce the number of required sensor elements as well as computational complexity - either for cost or for energy reasons. In this paper, we present two different systems that acquire hyperspectral images with less samples than the actual number of pixels, i.e. in a low dimensional representation. First, a design based on compressive sensing (CS) is explained. Second, adaptive direct sampling (ADS) is utilized to obtain coefficients of hyperspectral images in the 3D (Haar) wavelet domain, simplifying the reconstruction process significantly. Both approaches are compared with conventionally captured images with respect to image quality and classification accuracy. Our results based on real data show that in most cases only 40% of the samples suffice to obtain high quality images. Using ADS, the rate can be reduced even to a greater extent. Further results confirm that, although the number of acquired samples is dramatically reduced, we can still obtain high classification rates. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.