Robust Constrained Hyperspectral Unmixing Using Reconstructed-Image Regularization

Hyperspectral (HS) unmixing is the process of decomposing an HS image into material-specific spectra (endmembers) and their spatial distributions (abundance maps). Existing unmixing methods have two limitations with respect to noise robustness. First, if the input HS image is highly noisy, even if the balance between sparse and piecewise-smooth regularizations for abundance maps is carefully adjusted, noise may remain in the estimated abundance maps or undesirable artifacts may appear. Second, existing methods do not explicitly account for the effects of stripe noise, which is common in HS measurements, in their formulations, resulting in significant degradation of unmixing performance when such noise is present in the input HS image. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new robust hyperspectral unmixing method based on constrained convex optimization. Our method employs, in addition to the two regularizations for the abundance maps, regularizations for the HS image reconstructed by mixing the estimated abundance maps and endmembers. This strategy makes the unmixing process much more robust in highly-noisy scenarios, under the assumption that the abundance maps used to reconstruct the HS image with desirable spatio-spectral structure are also expected to have desirable properties. Furthermore, our method is designed to accommodate a wider variety of noise including stripe noise. To solve the formulated optimization problem, we develop an efficient algorithm based on a preconditioned primal-dual splitting method, which can automatically determine appropriate stepsizes based on the problem structure. Experiments on synthetic and real HS images demonstrate the advantages of our method over existing methods.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensin

Subspace Structure Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing is a crucial task for hyperspectral images (HSI) processing, which estimates the proportions of constituent materials of a mixed pixel. Usually, the mixed pixels can be approximated using a linear mixing model. Since each material only occurs in a few pixels in real HSI, sparse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and its extensions are widely used as solutions. Some recent works assume that materials are distributed in certain structures, which can be added as constraints to sparse NMF model. However, they only consider the spatial distribution within a local neighborhood and define the distribution structure manually, while ignoring the real distribution of materials that is diverse in different images. In this paper, we propose a new unmixing method that learns a subspace structure from the original image and incorporate it into the sparse NMF framework to promote unmixing performance. Based on the self-representation property of data points lying in the same subspace, the learned subspace structure can indicate the global similar graph of pixels that represents the real distribution of materials. Then the similar graph is used as a robust global spatial prior which is expected to be maintained in the decomposed abundance matrix. The experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world HSI datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method

Joint Nonlocal, Spectral, and Similarity Low-Rank Priors for Hyperspectral-Multispectral Image Fusion

The fusion of a low-spatial-and-high-spectral resolution hyperspectral image (HSI) with a high-spatial-and-low-spectral resolution multispectral image (MSI) allows synthesizing a high-resolution image (HRI), supporting remote sensing applications, such as disaster management, material identification, and precision agriculture. Unlike existing variational methods using low-rank regularizations separately, we present an HSI-MSI fusion method promoting various low-rank regularizations jointly. Our method refines the HRI spatial and spectral correlations from the individual HSI and MSI data through the proper plug-and-play (PnP) of a nonlocal patch-based denoiser in the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Notably, we consider the nonlocal self-similarity, the spectral low-rank, and introduce a rank-one similarity prior. Furthermore, we demonstrate via an extensive empirical study that the rank-one similarity prior is an inherent characteristic of the HRI. Simulations over standard benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed HSI-MSI fusion outperforming state-of-the-art methods, particularly in recovering low-contrast areas.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Interpretable Hyperspectral AI: When Non-Convex Modeling meets Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging, also known as image spectrometry, is a landmark technique in geoscience and remote sensing (RS). In the past decade, enormous efforts have been made to process and analyze these hyperspectral (HS) products mainly by means of seasoned experts. However, with the ever-growing volume of data, the bulk of costs in manpower and material resources poses new challenges on reducing the burden of manual labor and improving efficiency. For this reason, it is, therefore, urgent to develop more intelligent and automatic approaches for various HS RS applications. Machine learning (ML) tools with convex optimization have successfully undertaken the tasks of numerous artificial intelligence (AI)-related applications. However, their ability in handling complex practical problems remains limited, particularly for HS data, due to the effects of various spectral variabilities in the process of HS imaging and the complexity and redundancy of higher dimensional HS signals. Compared to the convex models, non-convex modeling, which is capable of characterizing more complex real scenes and providing the model interpretability technically and theoretically, has been proven to be a feasible solution to reduce the gap between challenging HS vision tasks and currently advanced intelligent data processing models