Discrete Wavelet Transform（DWT） was widely used in the application of Remote sensing image compression

noise reduction and image fusion recently.Principal Component Analysis（PCA） and DWT are performed separately with airborne hyperspectral data before a classification and regression tree are applied.The classification results of DWT are compared with PCA and with different mother wavelet DWT themselves.The results indicate that

when the number of the training samples is equal

the classification accuracy of DWT is higher than PCA

among them Haar wavelet performs best.The demanding number of samples of classification after DWT is less than PCA

but when the samples are enough

the compression ratio of PCA is higher than DWT.However

when DWT compression is performed

the most of the spectral information is preserved while PCA keeping the variance of the image only.