Hyperspectral anomaly detection method based on auto-encoder

A major drawback of most of the existing hyperspectral anomaly detection methods is the lack of an efficient background representation, which can successfully adapt to the varying complexity of hyperspectral images. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection method which represents the hyperspectral scenes of different complexity with the state-of-the-art representation learning method, namely auto-encoder. The proposed method first encodes the spectral image into a sparse code, then decodes the coded image, and finally, assesses the coding error at each pixel as a measure of anomaly. Predictive Sparse Decomposition Auto-encoder is utilized in the proposed anomaly method due to its efficient joint learning for the encoding and decoding functions. The performance of the proposed anomaly detection method is both tested on visible-near infrared (VNIR) and long wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral images and compared with the conventional anomaly detection method, namely Reed-Xiaoli (RX) detector.1 The experiments has verified the superiority of the proposed anomaly detection method in terms of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) performance.