Feature selection for spectral sensors with overlapping noisy spectral bands

Quantum-dot infrared photodetectors (QDIPs) are emerging as a promising technology for midwave- and longwave-infrared remote sensing and spectral imaging. One of the key advantages that QDIPs offer is their bias-dependent spectral response, which is brought about by the asymmetric bandstructure of the dot-in-a-well (DWELL) configuration. Photocurrents of a single QDIP, driven by different operational biases can, therefore, be viewed as outputs of different bands. It has been shown that this property, combined with post-processing strategies (applied to the outputs of a single sensor operated at different biases), can be used to perform adaptive spectral tuning and matched filtering. However, unlike traditional sensors, bands of a QDIP exhibit significant spectral overlap, an attribute that calls for the development of novel methods for feature selection. Additionally, the presence of detector noise further complicates such feature selection. In this paper, the theoretical foundations for discriminant analysis, based on spectrally adaptive feature selection, are developed and applied to data obtained from QDIP sensors in the presence of noise. The approach is based on a generalized canonical-correlation-analysis framework that is used in conjunction with an optimization criterion for the selection of feature subspaces. The criterion ranks the best linear combinations of the overlapping bands, providing minimal energy norm (a generalized Euclidean norm) between the centers of classes and their respective reconstructions in the space spanned by sensor bands. Experiments using ASTER-based synthetic QDIP data are used to illustrate the performance of rock-type Bayesian classification according to the proposed feature-selection method.