A solutionware for hyperspectral image processing and analysis

This chapter describes the concept of a solutionware for hyperspectral image analysis. Solutionware is a set of catalogued tools and toolsets that will provide for the rapid construction of a range of hyperspectral image processing algorithms and applications. The proposed hyperspectral solutionware will span toolboxes, visualization toolsets, and application-specific software systems at different computational resolution levels. A MATLAB hyperspectral image analysis toolbox (HIAT) provides the lowest resolution level but the friendliest interface where scientists and engineers in hyperspectral image processing can try different combinations of hyperspectral image processing algorithms in a simple fashion and add their own algorithms via the MATLAB programming language. As applications require the processing of large data sets in a timely fashion, the solutionware will provide grid, parallel, and hardware computational platforms to provide the user with computational alternatives that can be used to optimize performance and take full advantage of the data. In this chapter, the MATLAB hyperspectral toolbox is presented and parallel processing implementations of some of its components in the Itaniun architecture are described. A prototype version of the hyperspectral image processing toolbox over the grid, Grid-HSI, which extends the hyperspectral image processing environment developed in HIAT to take advantage of computational resources that can be distributed over the network, is depicted.