The visualization of hyperspectral images still constitutes an open question and may have an important impact on the consequent analysis tasks. The existing techniques fall mainly in the following categories: band selection, PCA-based approaches, linear approaches, approaches based on digital image processing techniques and machine/deep learning methods. In this article, we propose the usage of a linear model for color formation, to emulate the image acquisition process by a digital color camera. We show how the choice of spectral sensitivity curves has an impact on the visualization of hyperspectral images as RGB color images. In addition, we propose a non-linear model based on an artificial neural network. We objectively assess the impact and the intrinsic quality of the hyperspectral image visualization from the point of view of the amount of information and complexity: (i) in order to objectively quantify the amount of information present in the image, we use the color entropy as a metric; (ii) for the evaluation of the complexity of the scene we employ the color fractal dimension, as an indication of detail and texture characteristics of the image. For comparison, we use several state-of-the-art visualization techniques. We present experimental results on visualization using both the linear and non-linear color formation models, in comparison with four other methods and report on the superiority of the proposed non-linear model.

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