A novel threshold detection technique for the automatic construction of attribute profiles in hyperspectral images

Attribute profiles are well-acknowledged as one of the most significant techniques to characterize spectral-spatial properties of a hyperspectral image. The spectral-spatial content of an attribute profile is influenced by the threshold values considered during its construction. In this article, we propose a robust method to detect the threshold values automatically by overcoming the limitations of the existing techniques. The proposed method employs a tree structure representing the connected components of the image and evaluates attribute values at each node. Then, a total characteristic function (TCF) is defined that represents these attribute values in a nondecreasing order. The defined TCF is analyzed using a novel technique to detect a few informative thresholds for the construction of a low-dimensional attribute profile representing substantial spectral-spatial information. The proposed threshold detection method is computationally efficient. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed technique experiments are conducted on three real hyperspectral datasets using six different attributes and the results are compared to the recent state-of-the-art method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has several advantages over the existing state-of-the-art method.