Small target detection based on three-dimensional principal component analysis in hyperspectral imagery

Abstract

Research on target detection in hyperspectral imagery (HSI) has drawn much attention recently in many areas. Due to the limitation of the HSI sensor’s spatial resolution, the target of interest normally occupies only a few pixels, sometimes are even present as subpixels. This may increase the difficulties in target detection. Moreover, in some cases, such as in the rescue and surveillance tasks, small targets are the most significant information. Therefore, it is very difficult but important to effectively detect the interested small target. Using a three-dimensional tensor to model an HSI data cube can preserve as many as possible the original spatial-spectral constraint structures, which is conducive to utilize the whole information for small target detection. This paper proposes a novel and effective algorithm for small target detection in HSI based on three-dimensional principal component analysis (3D-PCA). According to the 3D-PCA, the significant components usually contain most information of imagery, in contrast, the details of small targets exist in the insignificant components. So, after 3D-PCA implemented on the HSI, the significant components which indicate the background of HSI are removed and the insignificant components are used to detect small targets. The algorithm is outstanding thanks to the tensor-based method which is applied to process the HSI directly, making full use of spatial and spectral information, by employing multilinear algebra. Experiments with a real HSI show that the detection probability of interested small targets improved greatly compared to the classical RX detector.