Spectral Wavelength Selection Method Based on Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Idea and Simulated Annealing Strategy

Wavelength selection (WS) is an effective means to address the presence of many uncorrelated and collinear variables in high‐dimensional spectral data that seriously influence the modeling accuracy and efficiency. Aiming to address too many wavelength variables selected by particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) and its premature convergence, this paper proposes a novel spectral WS approach—iPSOSA—based on the improved PSO idea and simulated annealing algorithms (SA) strategy. iPSOSA applies the velocity and position update ideas of PSO to the guided shift evolution process of the binary bits with the value of “1” in the particle and integrates with the perturbation strategy of the SA Metropolis acceptance criterion. It effectively solves the premature convergence of PSO and overcomes the low efficiency of the SA evolution, which has high efficiency in WS. By evaluating the modeling performance of different intelligent WS methods using two public spectral datasets from soil and maize, it was found that the iPSOSA outperforms the full‐spectrum and other three comparative algorithms. The best iPSOSA partial least squares regression models for soil organic matter and maize moisture contents have excellent regression performance, with the validation set's coefficient of determination higher than 0.98, relative root mean squared error lower than 1.50%, and residual predictive deviation higher than 8.00. iPSOSA presents better comprehensive performance in WS than traditional intelligent algorithms in terms of modeling performance, variable dimensionality, and searching efficiency, providing a new solution for obtaining high correlation wavelength variables in the spectral modeling process.