4. Different colour display strategies, are employed for fully exploiting the available rich multispectral information in MERIS data. The results of this analysis are incorporated in the development of the colour display methods. The methods are assessed using mutual information. Furthermore, feature extraction algorithms are applied to MERIS multispectral data. A comparative study between unsupervised learning algorithms such as principal components analysis (PCA), independent common analysis (ICA), and non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF), is carried out. The different feature extraction techniques are compared in terms of classification accuracy and dimensionality reduction performance.