Anomaly detection and classification for hyperspectral imagery

Anomaly detection becomes increasingly important in hyperspectral image analysis, since hyperspectral imagers can now uncover many material substances which were previously unresolved by multispectral sensors. Two types of anomaly detection are of interest and considered in this paper. One was previously developed by Reed and Yu to detect targets whose signatures are distinct from their surroundings. Another was designed to detect targets with low probabilities in an unknown image scene. Interestingly, they both operate the same form as does a matched filter. Moreover, they can be implemented in real-time processing, provided that the sample covariance matrix is replaced by the sample correlation matrix. One disadvantage of an anomaly detector is the lack of ability to discriminate the detected targets from another. In order to resolve this problem, the concept of target discrimination measures is introduced to cluster different types of anomalies into separate target classes. By using these class means as target information, the detected anomalies can be further classified. With inclusion of target discrimination in anomaly detection, anomaly classification can be implemented in a three-stage process, first by anomaly detection to find potential targets, followed by target discrimination to cluster the detected anomalies into separate target classes, and concluded by a classifier to achieve target classification. Experiments show that anomaly classification performs very differently from anomaly detection.