Subpixel Target Enhancement in Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral images due to their higher spectral resolution are increasingly being used for various remote sensing applications including information extraction at subpixel level. Typically whenever an object gets spectrally resolved but not spatially, mixed pixels in the images result. Numerous man made and/or natural disparate targets may thus occur inside such mixed pixels giving rise to subpixel target detection problem. Various spectral unmixing models such as linear mixture modeling (LMM) are in vogue to recover components of a mixed pixel. Spectral unmixing outputs both the endmember spectrum and their corresponding abundance fractions inside the pixel. It, however, does not provide spatial distribution of these abundance fractions within a pixel. This limits the applicability of hyperspectral data for subpixel target detection. In this paper, a new inverse Euclidean distance based super-resolution mapping method has been presented. In this method, the subpixel target detection is performed by adjusting spatial distribution of abundance fraction within a pixel of an hyperspectral image. Results obtained at different resolutions indicate that super-resolution mapping may effectively be utilized in enhancing the target detection at sub-pixel level.