  Band selection, by choosing a set of representative bands in hyperspectral
image (HSI), is an effective method to reduce the redundant information without
compromising the original contents. Recently, various unsupervised band
selection methods have been proposed, but most of them are based on
approximation algorithms which can only obtain suboptimal solutions toward a
specific objective function. This paper focuses on clustering-based band
selection, and proposes a new framework to solve the above dilemma, claiming
the following contributions: 1) An optimal clustering framework (OCF), which
can obtain the optimal clustering result for a particular form of objective
function under a reasonable constraint. 2) A rank on clusters strategy (RCS),
which provides an effective criterion to select bands on existing clustering
structure. 3) An automatic method to determine the number of the required
bands, which can better evaluate the distinctive information produced by
certain number of bands. In experiments, the proposed algorithm is compared to
some state-of-the-art competitors. According to the experimental results, the
proposed algorithm is robust and significantly outperform the other methods on
various data sets.
