Color display for hyperspectral imagery

Abstract—This paper investigates RGB color composition schemes for hyperspectral imagery display. A three-channel com-posite inevitably loses a significant amount of information con-tained in the original high-dimensional data. The objective here is to display the useful information as distinctively as possible for high-class separability. To achieve this objective, it is important to find an effective data processing step prior to color display. A series of supervised and unsupervised data transformation and classification algorithms are reviewed, implemented, and com-pared for this purpose. The resulting color displays are evaluated in terms of class separability using a statistical detector and perceptual color distance. We demonstrate that the use of the data processing step can significantly improve the quality of color display, whereas data classification generally outperforms data transformation, although the implementation is more complicated. Several instructive suggestions for practitioners are provided. Index Terms—Classification, color display, human visual per-ception, hyperspectral imaging, transformation, visualization. I