Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection Through Spectral Unmixing and Dictionary-Based Low-Rank Decomposition

Abstract

Anomaly detection has been known to be a challenging problem due to the uncertainty of anomaly and the interference of noise. In this paper, we focus on anomaly detection in hyperspectral images (HSIs) and propose a novel detection algorithm based on spectral unmixing and dictionary-based low-rank decomposition. The innovation is threefold. First, due to the highly mixed nature of pixels in HSI data, instead of using the raw pixel directly for anomaly detection, the proposed algorithm applies spectral unmixing to obtain the abundance vectors and uses these vectors for anomaly detection. We show that the abundance vectors possess more distinctive features to identify anomaly from background. Second, to better represent the highly correlated background and the sparse anomaly, we construct a dictionary based on the mean shift clustering of the abundance vectors to improve both the discriminative and representative powers of the algorithm. Finally, a low-rank matrix decomposition method based on the constructed dictionary is proposed to encourage the coefficients of the dictionary, instead of the background itself, to be low rank, and the residual matrix to be sparse. Anomalies can then be extracted by summing up the columns of the residual matrix. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on both synthetic and real data sets. Experimental results show that the proposed approach constantly achieves high detection rate, while maintaining low false alarm rate regardless of the type of images tested.