In this paper, we present an effective pre-processing algorithm for band selection approach which is an essential task in hyperspectral image analysis. The pre-processing algorithm is developed based on the average inter-band block-wise correlation coefficient measure and a simple thresholding strategy. Here, the threshold parameter is found based on the standard deviation of the average inter-band block-wise correlation coefficients. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated using the standard hyperspectral database created by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor. By comparing the detected bands with ground-truth annotations, we observed that the proposed algorithm identifies the noisy and water absorption bands in the high-dimensional hyperspectral images. The proposed algorithm achieves the classification accuracy of 94.73%. © 2011 IEEE.