HICF: A MATLAB PACKAGE FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION AND FUSION FOR EDUCATIONAL LEARNING AND RESEARCH

Abstract. A significant surge has been observed with the development and research in remote sensing in recent years for hyperspectral applications in Earth observation. Subsequently, the development of software and tools have also experienced an unprecedented rise, both in research as well as in academia. Although commercial software and tools such as ENVI by ITT Visual Information Solutions, Boulder, CO, USA are available for visualizing and analyzing the hyperspectral images, such software are expensive. Some open source toolboxes such as the MATLAB-based Hyperspectral Image Analysis Toolbox (HIAT) are also available. However, mostly these toolboxes have not been packaged for dissemination and operation without the MATLAB software which is commercial. In this paper, we introduce the Hyperspectral Image Classification and Fusion (HICF) package which is being developed at the Geoinformatics laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in MATLAB that can be used by standalone installation with an open source supplementary MATLAB compiler. This software is intended to provide a collection of algorithms both conventional and those developed at the Geoinformatics laboratory that utilizes the numerical computing capability of MATLAB for the processing of hyperspectral and multispectral imagery. The HICF software comprises a simple design of the graphical user interface which can be efficiently used particularly for academic purposes.