Exploring Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection with Human Vision: A Small Target Aware Detector

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) aims to localize pixel points whose spectral features differ from the background. HAD is essential in scenarios of unknown or camouflaged target features, such as water quality monitoring, crop growth monitoring and camouflaged target detection, where prior information of targets is difficult to obtain. Existing HAD methods aim to objectively detect and distinguish background and anomalous spectra, which can be achieved almost effortlessly by human perception. However, the underlying processes of human visual perception are thought to be quite complex. In this paper, we analyze hyperspectral image (HSI) features under human visual perception, and transfer the solution process of HAD to the more robust feature space for the first time. Specifically, we propose a small target aware detector (STAD), which introduces saliency maps to capture HSI features closer to human visual perception. STAD not only extracts more anomalous representations, but also reduces the impact of low-confidence regions through a proposed small target filter (STF). Furthermore, considering the possibility of HAD algorithms being applied to edge devices, we propose a full connected network to convolutional network knowledge distillation strategy. It can learn the spectral and spatial features of the HSI while lightening the network. We train the network on the HAD100 training set and validate the proposed method on the HAD100 test set. Our method provides a new solution space for HAD that is closer to human visual perception with high confidence. Sufficient experiments on real HSI with multiple method comparisons demonstrate the excellent performance and unique potential of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/majitao-xd/STAD-HAD

Superpixel guided deep-sparse-representation learning for hyperspectral image classification

This paper presents a new technique for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification by using superpixel guided deep-sparse-representation learning. The proposed technique constructs a hierarchical architecture by exploiting the sparse coding to learn the HSI representation. Specifically, a multiple-layer architecture using different superpixel maps is designed, where each superpixel map is generated by downsampling the superpixels gradually along with enlarged spatial regions for labeled samples. In each layer, sparse representation of pixels within every spatial region is computed to construct a histogram via the sum-pooling with $l-{1}$ normalization. Finally, the representations (features) learned from the multiple-layer network are aggregated and trained by a support vector machine classifier. The proposed technique has been evaluated over three public HSI data sets, including the Indian Pines image set, the Salinas image set, and the University of Pavia image set. Experiments show superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods