Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This study is focused on applying genetic algorithms (GA) to model and band selection in hyperspectral image classification. We use a forensic-inspired data set of seven hyperspectral images with blood and five visually similar substances to test GA-optimised classifiers in two scenarios: when the training and test data come from the same image and when they come from different images, which is a more challenging task due to significant spectra differences. In our experiments we compare GA with a classic model optimisation through grid search. Our results show that GA-based model optimisation can reduce the number of bands and create an accurate classifier that outperforms the GS-based reference models, provided that during model optimisation it has access to examples similar to test data. We illustrate this with experiment highlighting the importance of a validation set.