Multitarget Detection Algorithms for Multitemporal Remote Sensing Data

Target detection is always an important topic in the field of hyper/multispectral remote sensing image processing. At present, target detection algorithms in this field are generally limited to processing single-temporal remote sensing data, and they cannot obtain satisfactory results when the spectra of target and background are similar to each other. Recently, a target detection algorithm called filter tensor analysis (FTA), which is specially designed for multitemporal remote sensing data, has been reported and has achieved better detection results in many cases than the traditional single-temporal methods. However, FTA can only extract one target of interest at a time, and it cannot work when there are multiple targets of interest in the image. Therefore, considering that the matrix form of the FTA method is similar to that of the constrained energy minimization (CEM) model, it naturally comes to us that we can combine the tensor filter in FTA and the multiple target constraints to detect multiple targets by fully exploiting the time-series information in multitemporal data. To be specific, through: 1) adding the "output to one" constraints to the multiple targets in FTA; 2) applying linear/nonlinear function to the outputs of FTA for the multiple targets; and 3) modifying the autocorrelation matrix in FTA, four multitarget detection algorithms for multitemporal remote sensing data are proposed in this article. Experiments with simulation data and real data both show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods.