The Impact of the PCA Dimensionality Reduction for CNN based Hyperspectral Image Classification

CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) is one representative deep learning algorithm, which can extract high-level spatial and spectral features, and has been applied for hyperspectral image classification. However, one significant drawback behind the application of CNNs in hyperspectral images is the high dimensionality of the data, which increases the training time and processing complexity. To address this problem, several CNN based hyperspectral image classification studies have exploited PCA (Principal Component Analysis) for dimensionality reduction. One limitation to this is that the spectral information of the original image can be lost through PCA. Although it is clear that the use of PCA affects the accuracy and the CNN training time, the impact of PCA for CNN based hyperspectral image classification has been understudied. The purpose of this study is to analyze the quantitative effect of PCA in CNN for hyperspectral image classification. The hyperspectral images were first transformed through PCA and applied into the CNN model by varying the size of the reduced dimensionality. In addition, 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN frameworks were applied to analyze the sensitivity of the PCA with respect to the convolution kernel in the model. Experimental results were evaluated based on classification accuracy, learning time, variance ratio, and training process. The size of the reduced dimensionality was the most efficient when the explained variance ratio recorded 99.7%~99.8%. Since the 3D kernel had higher classification accuracy in the original-CNN than the PCA-CNN in comparison to the 2D-CNN, the results revealed that the dimensionality reduction was relatively less effective in 3D kernel.