Saliency based visualization of hyper-spectral images

Abstract

The problem with visualization of hyper-spectral images on tri-stimulus displays arises from the fact that they contain hundreds of spectral bands while generally used display devices support only three bands/channels namely blue, green and red. Therefore, for visualization a hyper-spectral (HS) image has to be reduced to three bands. The main challenge while performing this band reduction is to retain and display the maximum information available in a hyper-spectral image. Human visual system focuses attention on certain regions in images called “salient regions”. Therefore to provide a comprehensive representation of hyper-spectral data on tri-stimulus displays we propose to use a weighted fusion method of saliency maps and hyper-spectral bands. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated by tests on both urban and countryside images of AVIRIS and ROSIS sensors.