Detection of Subpixel Targets on Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Background Endmember Extraction

The low spatial resolution associated with imaging spectrometers has caused subpixel target detection to become a special problem in hyperspectral image (HSI) processing that poses considerable challenges. In subpixel target detection, the size of the target is smaller than that of a pixel, making the spatial information of the target almost useless so that a detection algorithm must rely on the spectral information of the image. To address this problem, this article proposes a subpixel target detection algorithm for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery based on background endmember extraction. First, we propose a background endmember extraction algorithm based on robust nonnegative dictionary learning to obtain the background endmember spectrum of the image. Next, we construct a hyperspectral subpixel target detector based on pixel reconstruction (HSPRD) to perform pixel-by-pixel target detection on the image to be tested using the background endmember spectral matrix and the spectra of known ground targets. Finally, the subpixel target detection results are obtained. The experimental results show that, compared with other existing subpixel target detection methods, the algorithm proposed here can provide the optimum target detection results for both synthetic and real-world data sets.