Sparse Unmixing With Dictionary Pruning for Hyperspectral Change Detection

Abstract

The localization of changes that occur between the images in a multitemporal series is crucial for many applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to military surveillance. In contrast to traditional change detection methods, unmixing-based change detection has been shown to have the important added benefit of providing subpixel-level information on the nature of the changes, instead of only providing the location of the changes. Recently, sparse unmixing has also been introduced to hyperspectral change detection, resulting in a method that circumvents the drawbacks of regular spectral unmixing approaches. Sparse unmixing-based change detection reveals the changes that occur in a multitemporal series, at subpixel level, and in terms of the library spectra and their sparse abundances, and provides enhanced change detection performance, especially when subpixel-level changes have occurred. However, sparse unmixing is generally an ill-conditioned and time-consuming process, especially as the size of the utilized spectral library increases. In this paper, dictionary pruning is exploited for the first time for hyperspectral change detection using sparse unmixing, in order to alleviate the ill-conditioning of the problem and achieve decreased computation times and enhanced change detection performance. Experimental results on both realistic synthetic and real datasets are used to validate the proposed approach.