A novel anomaly detection method incorporating target information derived from hyperspectral imagery

Anomaly detection is an active research topic in hyperspectral remote sensing and has been applied in many areas including environmental monitoring, urban survey, mineral mapping, and national security. Usually, it makes a detection decision without any prior target information or background information. Several anomaly detection algorithms (e.g. Reed-Xiaoli detector, blocked adaptive computationally efficient outlier nominator and random-selection-based anomaly detector) have been developed, which rely on estimating background information only from a hyperspectral image without considering target information in making a detection decision. These methods may be efficient in general but sometimes with high false alarm rate (FAR). In order to reduce FAR, this study proposes a novel method that incorporates both background and target information, derived from the hyperspectral imagery, into anomaly detection algorithms. The target information is helpful to detect anomalies as outliers. With a scene of real airborne visible infrared imaging spectrometer data, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has produced better detection results and higher time efficiency compared with those using the traditional algorithms that only consider background information.