The retrieval of impervious surface is a hot topic in the remote sensing field in the past decade. Nevertheless, studies on retrieving impervious surface from hyperspectral image and the comparison of the performances in retrieving impervious surface between hyperspectral and multispectral images are rarely reported. Therefore, The present paper focuses on the characteristics of hyperspectral (EO-1 Hyperion) and multispectral (Landsat TM/ETM+) images and implements a complementary study on the comparison based on the retrieved impervious surface information between Hyperion and TM/ETM+ data. For up to 242 bands of Hyperion image, a further study was carried out to select feature bands for impervious surface retrieving using stepwise discriminant analysis. As a result, 11 feature bands were selected and a new image named Hyperion’ was thus composed. The new Hyperion’ image was used to investigate whether this band-reduced image could obtain higher accuracy in retrieving impervious surface. The three test regions were selected from Fuzhou, Guangzhou and Hangzhou of China, with date-coincident or nearly coincident image pairs of the used sensors. The linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) was employed to retrieve impervious surface and the results were accessed for their accuracy. The comparison shows that the Hyperion image has higher accuracy than TM/ETM+, and the Hyperion’ composed of the selected 11 feature bands has the highest accuracy. The advantages of Hyperion in spectral and radiometric resolutions over TM/ETM+ are believed to be the main factors contributing to the higher accuracy. The high spectral and radiometric resolutions of Hyperion image allow the sensor to have higher sensitivity in distinguishing subtle spectral changes of ground objects. While, the highest accuracy the 11-band Hyperion’ image achieved is owing to the significant reduction of the band dimension of the image and thus the band redundancy.