Siamese Transformer Network for Hyperspectral Image Target Detection

Abstract

Hyperspectral target detection can be described as locating targets of interest within a hyperspectral image based on prior information of targets. The complexity of actual scenes limits the performance of traditional statistical methods that rely on model assumptions, and traditional machine learning methods rely on mapping functions with limited complexity. To address these problems, we propose a Siamese transformer network for hyperspectral image target detection (STTD). The contribution of this article is threefold. First, we propose a novel method of constructing training samples using only the image itself and the limited prior information, which is suitable for target detection based on the Siamese network framework. Second, the Siamese network framework is utilized to solve the problem of similarity metric learning, i.e., make homogeneous features as close as possible and heterogeneous features as far as possible. Third, the most state-of-the-art network, transformer, is applied as the backbone of our proposed Siamese network to extract global features from spectra with long-range dependencies to achieve target detection. Furthermore, we make adaptive improvements to transformer for hyperspectral images. The proposed method shows its unique advantages in suppressing the background to a low level and highlighting the target with high probability. Experiments on five different datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed STTD as compared to the state-of-the-art.