Endmember learning with k-means through SCD model in hyperspectral scene reconstructions

This paper proposes a simple yet effective method for improving the efficiency of sparse coding dictionary learning (DL) with an implication of enhancing the ultimate usefulness of compressive sensing (CS) technology for practical applications, such as in hyperspectral imaging (HSI) scene reconstruction. CS is the technique which allows sparse signals to be decomposed into a sparse representation “a” of a dictionary Du" role="presentation" style="max-height: none; display: inline; line-height: normal; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; position: relative;">Du . The goodness of the learnt dictionary has direct impacts on the quality of the end results, e.g., in the HSI scene reconstructions. This paper proposes the construction of a concise and comprehensive dictionary by using the cluster centres of the input dataset, and then a greedy approach is adopted to learn all elements within this dictionary. The proposed method consists of an unsupervised clustering algorithm (K-Means), and it is then coupled with an advanced sparse coding dictionary (SCD) method such as the basis pursuit algorithm (orthogonal matching pursuit, OMP) for the dictionary learning. The effectiveness of the proposed K-Means Sparse Coding Dictionary (KMSCD) is illustrated through the reconstructions of several publicly available HSI scenes. The results have shown that the proposed KMSCD achieves ~40% greater accuracy, 5 times faster convergence and is twice as robust as that of the classic Spare Coding Dictionary (C-SCD) method that adopts random sampling of data for the dictionary learning. Over the five data sets that have been employed in this study, it is seen that the proposed KMSCD is capable of reconstructing these scenes with mean accuracies of approximately 20–500% better than all competing algorithms adopted in this work. Furthermore, the reconstruction efficiency of trace materials in the scene has been assessed: it is shown that the KMSCD is capable of recovering ~12% better than that of the C-SCD. These results suggest that the proposed DL using a simple clustering method for the construction of the dictionary has been shown to enhance the scene reconstruction substantially. When the proposed KMSCD is incorporated with the Fast non-negative orthogonal matching pursuit (FNNOMP) to constrain the maximum number of materials to coexist in a pixel to four, experiments have shown that it achieves approximately ten times better than that constrained by using the widely employed TMM algorithm. This may suggest that the proposed DL method using KMSCD and together with the FNNOMP will be more suitable to be the material allocation module of HSI scene simulators like the CameoSim packag

Endmember-Guided Unmixing Network (EGU-Net): A General Deep Learning Framework for Self-Supervised Hyperspectral Unmixing

Over the past decades, enormous efforts have been made to improve the performance of linear or nonlinear mixing models for hyperspectral unmixing (HU), yet their ability to simultaneously generalize various spectral variabilities (SVs) and extract physically meaningful endmembers still remains limited due to the poor ability in data fitting and reconstruction and the sensitivity to various SVs. Inspired by the powerful learning ability of deep learning (DL), we attempt to develop a general DL approach for HU, by fully considering the properties of endmembers extracted from the hyperspectral imagery, called endmember-guided unmixing network (EGU-Net). Beyond the alone autoencoder-like architecture, EGU-Net is a two-stream Siamese deep network, which learns an additional network from the pure or nearly pure endmembers to correct the weights of another unmixing network by sharing network parameters and adding spectrally meaningful constraints (e.g., nonnegativity and sum-to-one) toward a more accurate and interpretable unmixing solution. Furthermore, the resulting general framework is not only limited to pixelwise spectral unmixing but also applicable to spatial information modeling with convolutional operators for spatial–spectral unmixing. Experimental results conducted on three different datasets with the ground truth of abundance maps corresponding to each material demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the EGU-Net over state-of-the-art unmixing algorithms. The codes will be available from the website: https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TNNLS_EGU-Net

Regularization approaches to hyperspectral unmixing

We consider a few different approaches to hyperspectral unmixing of remotely sensed imagery which exploit and extend recent advances in sparse statistical regularization, handling of constraints and dictionary reduction. Hyperspectral unmixing methods often use a conventional least-squares based lasso which assumes that the data follows the Gaussian distribution, we use this as a starting point. In addition, we consider a robust approach to sparse spectral unmixing of remotely sensed imagery which reduces the sensitivity of the estimator to outliers. Due to water absorption and atmospheric effects that affect data collection, hyperspectral images are prone to have large outliers. The framework comprises of several well-principled penalties. A non-convex, hyper-Laplacian prior is incorporated to induce sparsity in the number of active pure spectral components, and total variation regularizer is included to exploit the spatial-contextual information of hyperspectral images. Enforcing the sum-to-one and non-negativity constraint on the models parameters is essential for obtaining realistic estimates. We consider two approaches to account for this: an iterative heuristic renormalization and projection onto the positive orthant, and a reparametrization of the coefficients which gives rise to a theoretically founded method. Since the large size of modern spectral libraries cannot only present computational challenges but also introduce collinearities between regressors, we introduce a library reduction step. This uses the multiple signal classi fication (MUSIC) array processing algorithm, which both speeds up unmixing and yields superior results in scenarios where the library size is extensive. We show that although these problems are non-convex, they can be solved by a properly de fined algorithm based on either trust region optimization or iteratively reweighted least squares. The performance of the different approaches is validated in several simulated and real hyperspectral data experiments

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