An assessment of independent component analysis for detection of military targets from hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral data acquired over hundreds of narrow contiguous wavelength bands are extremely suitable for target detection due to their high spectral resolution. Though spectral response of every material is expected to be unique, but in practice, it exhibits variations, which is known as spectral variability. Most target detection algorithms depend on spectral modelling using a priori available target spectra In practice, target spectra is, however, seldom available a priori. Independent component analysis (ICA) is a new evolving technique that aims at finding out components which are statistically independent or as independent as possible. The technique therefore has the potential of being used for target detection applications. A assessment of target detection from hyperspectral images using ICA and other algorithms based on spectral modelling may be of immense interest, since ICA does not require a priori target information. The aim of this paper is, thus, to assess the potential of ICA based algorithm vis a vis other prevailing algorithms for military target detection. Four spectral matching algorithms namely Orthogonal Subspace Projection (OSP), Constrained Energy Minimisation (CEM), Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Spectral Correlation Mapper (SCM), and four anomaly detection algorithms namely OSP anomaly detector (OSPAD), Reed–Xiaoli anomaly detector (RXD), Uniform Target Detector (UTD) and a combination of Reed–Xiaoli anomaly detector and Uniform Target Detector (RXD–UTD) were considered. The experiments were conducted using a set of synthetic and AVIRIS hyperspectral images containing aircrafts as military targets. A comparison of true positive and false positive rates of target detections obtained from ICA and other algorithms plotted on a receiver operating curves (ROC) space indicates the superior performance of the ICA over other algorithms.

► A set of spectral matching and anomaly detection algorithms were studied to assess their performance vis a vis the potential of ICA in military target detection. ► Small targets of the size of an aircraft were considered in experiments conducted using synthetic data (with 30 bands) and an actual AVIRIS data containing aircrafts as military targets. ► The effect of spectral variability on the performance of various spectral matching algorithms was also analysed. ► An ROC based analysis of the results obtained indicated superior performance of ICA.