Learning Single Spectral Abundance for Hyperspectral Subpixel Target Detection

Due to the limitation of target size and spatial resolution, targets of interest in hyperspectral images (HSIs) often appear as subpixel targets, which makes hyperspectral target detection still faces an important bottleneck, that is, subpixel target detection. In this article, we propose a new detector by learning single spectral abundance for hyperspectral subpixel target detection (denoted as LSSA). Different from most existing hyperspectral detectors that are designed based on a match of the spectrum assisted by spatial information or focusing on the background, the proposed LSSA addresses the problem of detecting subpixel targets by learning a spectral abundance of the target of interest directly. In LSSA, the abundance of the prior target spectrum is updated and learned, while the prior target spectrum is fixed in a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) model. It turns out that such a way is quite effective to learn the abundance of subpixel targets and contributes to detecting subpixel targets in hyperspectral imagery (HSI). Numerous experiments are conducted on one simulated dataset and five real datasets, and the results indicate that the LSSA yields superior performance in hyperspectral subpixel target detection and outperforms its counterparts.