Kernel Based Subspace Projection of Near Infrared Hyperspectral Images of Maize Kernels

In this paper we present an exploratory analysis of hyperspectral 900-1700 nm images of maize kernels. The imaging device is a line scanning hyper spectral camera using a broadband NIR illumination. In order to explore the hyperspectral data we compare a series of subspace projection methods including principal component analysis and maximum autocorrelation factor analysis. The latter utilizes the fact that interesting phenomena in images exhibit spatial autocorrelation. However, linear projections often fail to grasp the underlying variability on the data. Therefore we propose to use so-called kernel version of the two afore-mentioned methods. The kernel methods implicitly transform the data to a higher dimensional space using non-linear transformations while retaining the computational complexity. Analysis on our data example illustrates that the proposed kernel maximum autocorrelation factor transform outperform the linear methods as well as kernel principal components in producing interesting projections of the data.