Automated Discovery of Parsimonious Spectral Indices via Normalized Difference Polynomials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce an automated way to find compact spectral indices for vegetation classification. The idea is to take all pairwise normalized differences from the spectral bands and then build polynomial combinations up to a fixed degree, which gives a structured search space that still keeps the illumination invariance needed in remote sensing. For a sensor with $n$ bands this produces $\binom{n}{2}$ base normalized differences, and the degree-2 polynomial expansion gives 1,080 candidate features for the 10-band Sentinel-2 configuration we use here. Feature selection methods (ANOVA filtering, recursive elimination, and $L_1$-regularized SVM) then pick out small sets of indices that reach the desired accuracy, so the final models stay simple and easy to interpret. We test the framework on Kochia (\textit{Bassia scoparia}) detection using Sentinel-2 imagery from Saskatchewan, Canada ($N = 2{,}318$ samples, 2022--2024). A single degree-2 index, the product of two normalized differences from the red-edge bands, already reaches 96.26\% accuracy, and using eight indices only raises this to 97.70\%. In every case the chosen features are degree-2 products built from bands $b_4$ through $b_8$, which suggests that the discriminative signal comes from spectral \emph{interactions} rather than individual band ratios. Because the indices involve only simple arithmetic, they can be deployed directly in platforms like Google Earth Engine. The same approach works for other sensors and classification tasks, and an open-source implementation (\texttt{ndindex}) is available.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".