Extreme learning machine (ELM) is of great interest to the machine learning society due to its extremely simple training step. Its performance sensitivity to the number of hidden neurons is studied under the context of hyperspectral remote sensing image classification. An empirical linear relationship between the number of training samples and the number of hidden neurons is proposed. Such a relationship can be easily estimated with two small training sets and extended to large training sets to greatly reduce computational cost. The kernel version of ELM (KELM) is also implemented with the radial basis function kernel, and such a linear relationship is still suitable. The experimental results demonstrated that when the number of hidden neurons is appropriate, the performance of ELM may be slightly lower than the linear SVM, but the performance of KELM can be comparable to the kernel version of SVM (KSVM). The computational cost of ELM and KELM is much lower than that of the linear SVM and KSVM, respectively.

Although hyperspectral images (HSIs) captured by satellites provide much information in spectral regions, some bands are redundant or have large amounts of noise, which are not suitable for image analysis. To address this problem, we introduce a method for reconstructing the HSI with noise reduction and contrast enhancement using a matting model for the first time. The matting model refers to each spectral band of an HSI that can be decomposed into three components, i.e., alpha channel, spectral foreground, and spectral background. First, one spectral band of an HSI with more refined information than most other bands is selected, and is referred to as an alpha channel of the HSI to estimate the hyperspectral foreground and hyperspectral background. Finally, a combination operation is applied to reconstruct the HSI. In addition, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier and three sparsity-based classifiers, i.e., orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), simultaneous OMP, and OMP based on first-order neighborhood system weighted classifiers, are utilized on the reconstructed HSI and the original HSI to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, using the reconstructed HSI, the average accuracy of the SVM classifier can be improved by as much as 19%.