DETECTION AND AREA ESTIMATION FOR PHOTOVOLTAIC PANELS IN URBAN HYPERSPECTRAL REMOTE SENSING DATA BY AN ORIGINAL NMF-BASED UNMIXING METHOD

Hyperspectral remote sensing data offer unique opportunities for the characterization of land surface in urban areas. However, no hyperspectral-unmixing based studies have been conducted to automatically detect photovoltaic panels, which represent one of the important components of energy systems in such areas. In this paper, a hyperspectral-unmixing based method is proposed to detect photovoltaic panels and to estimate their areas. This approach is based on an original multiplicative nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm with some known photovoltaic panel spectra. The proposed method can be considered as a partial/ informed NMF approach. Experiments are conducted on realistic synthetic and real data to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. In both cases, obtained results show that the proposed method yields much better overall performance than a method from the literature.