Hyperspectral unmixing addresses the challenge of mixed pixels in hyperspectral images by identifying the number of pure pixels (endmembers), extracting their spectral signatures, and estimating their proportions (abundances) in each pixel composing the scene. Traditional hyperspectral unmixing methods often struggle with scalability and computational efficiency when dealing with gigabyte-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a distributed parallel geometric distance (DPGD) method for hyperspectral unmixing, exploring the computational power and benefits of distributed parallel processing within a distributed computing framework. The proposed DPGD leverages geometric distance measurements to accurately identify endmembers and estimate their abundances, taking into account the intrinsic similarities within hyperspectral images. This provides a clearer representation of the data structure, leading to improved unmixing accuracy. By using the Spark programming model, the computational workload is efficiently distributed across multiple nodes, significantly reducing processing time. Experimental results on real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that DPGD scales effectively up to 32 nodes and 290.9 GB of data, achieving competitive accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ccaadaro/DPDG.

Hyperspectral unmixing, an essential and fundamental task in remote sensing, focuses on estimating endmembers (spectrally pure components) and their fractional abundances within each mixed pixel of a hyperspectral image. With the advent of deep learning (DL), the field of hyperspectral unmixing has made significant progress. Among DL approaches, autoencoder-based models have shown promising results. However, most unmixing methods estimate the endmembers by the weights of the linear layers in the decoder of their networks, making their performance highly dependent on weight initialization. Moreover, noise is not explicitly accounted for in most recent methods that use spectral angle distance (SAD) loss. To avoid the initialization problems, we developed an innovative inversion strategy to directly estimate the endmembers. Moreover, to optimally account for noise, an end-to-end network is proposed that integrates both denoising and unmixing. Finally, for an improved feature extraction, a novel spectral-spatial attention module is integrated in the network. Extensive experiments on a synthetic and three real datasets show that the proposed method significantly and consistently outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods. The full code is available at https://github.com/xuanwentao for public evaluation.

In recent years, the rapid development of remote sensing (RS) technology has led to a drastic increase in the availability of RS images. This calls for the need to develop new methods able to effectively and efficiently retrieve the required instances from a massive amount of RS imagery. In retrieval tasks, finding the nearest-neighbor sample of the retrieval query is a fundamental research topic. Exhaustive comparison is the simplest method to accomplish this task. However, due to the involved computational complexity and memory limitations, this solution is no longer feasible in large data retrieval tasks. As an important branch of approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval (NNR), hash algorithms transform high-dimensional data into low-bit expressions (hash codes) with elements of 0 and 1 to reduce storage and computational costs. Hash algorithms aim to preserve the same nearest-neighbor relationship between the learned hash codes and the original data. Existing hash algorithms are divided into two classes: shallow and deep methods. Furthermore, deep hash algorithms can be divided into (semi-) supervised and unsupervised algorithms. In this article, representative hash-based RS image retrieval (HBRSIR) methods are reviewed, studying the application of hashing in other areas of the RS community and introducing available datasets and evaluation metrics for RS image retrieval (RSIR). The performance of representative and cross-modal hashing methods is validated using two common RSIR datasets (UCMerced and AID) and a cross-modal dataset (DSRSID). Prospects of future work summarizing HBRSIR are also provided.

Hyperspectral unmixing is a crucial technique in remote sensing data processing that aims to estimate component information from mixed pixels in hyperspectral images. Most existing deep learning-based hyperspectral unmixing models employ autoencoder (AE) networks to reconstruct hyperspectral images and estimate abundance maps. Here, the weight between the reconstructed and the softmax layers is used to extract/estimate endmember signatures. However, AEs are heavily dependent on initial weights, which introduces inherent randomness, potentially compromising unmixing accuracy. To address this issue, in this article, we present a new dual-feature fusion network (DFFN) for enhanced hyperspectral unmixing. Our DFFN mainly consists of four modules: 1) a feature fusion module (FFM); 2) an abundance estimation module (AEM); 3) an endmember estimation module (EEM); and 4) a reconstruction module (RM). First, FFM calculates spectral and spatial similarities and then enhances the hyperspectral image by matrix multiplications with similarity matrices. Second, AEM takes the enhanced hyperspectral image as input and uses convolutional layers to estimate abundances and reconstruct the image. Next, the reconstructed image is fed into EEM to automatically estimate endmembers. RE performs the final reconstruction through matrix multiplication of the estimated endmembers and abundances. Experiments on synthetic and real hyperspectral datasets, together with a comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, demonstrate the superiority of our newly proposed DFFN. The full code is released athttps://github.com/xuanwentaofor public evaluation.

Hyperspectral unmixing is a vibrant research field that focuses on the task of decomposing mixed pixels into a collection of pure spectral signatures, known as endmembers, along with their corresponding fractional abundances. Conventional unmixing algorithms often need to combine two techniques, namely endmember extraction and abundance estimation, to accomplish the unmixing task. Recently, deep learning (DL) has succeeded in the field of hyperspectral unmixing due to its strong feature learning and data-fitting capabilities. By extracting the output and weight of a particular layer as abundance maps and endmember signatures, available DL methods can directly unmix hyperspectral images. However, in order to improve the performance of spectral unmixing, such available DL methods frequently employ the results of endmember extraction algorithms –in most cases, the well-known vertex component analysis (VCA)– as the initial weights, which leads to significant limitations in their performance: a) the unmixing results are heavily dependent on the initialization given by VCA, and b) the randomness of VCA is passed to the unmixing network. In this paper, we design a new method called abundance-guided spectral and spatial network (A2SN) which not only skips the weights to extract endmember features directly from the network, but also estimates the abundance maps and reconstructs images directly. In particular, the proposed A2SN employs different kernels to capture spectral and spatial information. We also propose an abundance-guided attention spectral and spatial attention network (A2SAN) for hyperspectral unmixing by integrating attention mechanisms into A2SN. As a result, A2SAN is a completely innovative unmixing method that employs attention and reconstruction directly for hyperspectral unmixing, rather than just as modules for information extraction. Most importantly, both A2SN and A2SAN use a weighted summation of the feature maps to reconstruct the image and increase the noise immunity of the network. Experimental results, conducted on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of A2SN and A2SAN over state-of-the-art unmixing methods. Our full code is released at https://github.com/xuanwentao/A2SN-and-A2SAN for public evaluation.

With the recent development of remote sensing technology, large image repositories have been collected. In order to retrieve the desired images of massive remote sensing data sets effectively and efficiently, we propose a novel central cohesion gradual hashing (CCGH) mechanism for remote sensing image retrieval. First, we design a deep hashing model based on ResNet-18 which has a shallow architecture and extracts features of remote sensing imagery effectively and efficiently. Then, we propose a new training model by minimizing a central cohesion loss which guarantees that remote-sensing hash codes are as close to their hash code centers as possible. We also adopt a quantization loss which promotes that outputs are binary values. The combination of both loss functions produces highly discriminative hash codes. Finally, a gradual sign-like function is used to reduce quantization errors. By means of the aforementioned developments, our CCGH achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in the task of remote sensing image retrieval. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public remote sensing image data sets. The obtained results support the fact that our newly developed CCGH is competitive with other existing deep hashing methods.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) comprise plenty of information in the spatial and spectral domain, which is highly beneficial for performing classification tasks in a very accurate way. Recently, attention mechanisms have been widely used in HSI classification due to their ability to extract relevant spatial and spectral features. Notwithstanding their positive results, most of the attentional strategies usually introduce a significant number of parameters to be trained, making the models more complex and increasing the computational load. In this paper, we develop a new parameter-free attention network for HSI classification. The main advantage of our model is that it does not add parameters to the original network (as opposed to other state-of-the-art approaches), whilst providing higher classification accuracies. Extensive experimental validations and quantitative comparisons are conducted –using different benchmark HSIs– to illustrate these advantages. Code is available on https://github.com/mhaut/Free2Resnet.

Autoencoder-based hyperspectral anomaly detectors have received significant attention. The core of these detectors is to reconstruct backgrounds by optimizing autoencoders so that anomalies can be detected by reconstruction residuals. Nevertheless, existing methods are flawed in two aspects: 1) most of them reconstruct the background along with the anomalies, resulting in undesired performance for large target detection in complex backgrounds; 2) they only focus on the encoder optimization part, ignoring the decoder reconstruction quality of the background. Given the above, this paper proposes a background-guided deformable convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) network with three mutually supportive parts, including encoder, decoder, and background guidance modules. In the encoder, deformable convolution is introduced into regular convolution to build the adaptive spatial feature extractor to fit complex spatial structures, whilst a non-local convolution is introduced to build an external feature extractor to capture global spatial relationships. Further, a mask is designed to filter potential anomalous information, curbing the representation of high-frequency anomalies to focus on widespread backgrounds. In the decoder, a background guidance module (considering the physical meaning of linear reconstruction) is built, guiding the proposed network learning via two strategies. One is initializing the weight of the decoder, and another is adding a loss term. Notably, both the number of output channels of the encoder and the decoder construction are determined by the background guidance module, which creates a bridge between the network design and practical situations. A profound analysis demonstrates the outstanding performance of the proposed method, which outperforms traditional and deep learning methods, proving that the novel designs introduced in the network architecture are extremely effective.

Capsule networks have been a breakthrough in the field of automatic image analysis, opening a new frontier in the art for image classification. Nevertheless, these models were initially designed for RGB images and naively applying these techniques to remote sensing hyperspectral images (HSI) may lead to sub-optimal behaviour, blowing up the number of parameters needed to train the model or not correctly modeling the spectral relations between the different layers of the scene. To overcome this drawback, this work implements a new capsule-based architecture with attention mechanism to improve the HSI data processing. The attention mechanism is applied during the concurrent iterative routing procedure through an inverted dot-product attention.

Hyperspectral unmixing aims at extracting pure spectral signatures and estimating their corresponding abundances at each pixel. Traditional unmixing algorithms consider end-member extraction and abundance estimation as two separate steps, and the completion of abundance estimation requires results from other endmember extraction algorithms. Considering that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have powerful learning and data fitting capabilities, some techniques based on deep learning (DL) have been proposed in the literature. Most of them only utilize spectral information and neglect spatial information. In addition, existing unmixing methods based on DL usually extract the weight and output of a specific activation layer as endmembers and abundances, respectively. In our work, we exploit 3D convolution to propose a new 3D convolution unmixing network (3DCUN) for hyperspectral unmixing. Two types of real data, i.e., Samson and Jasper, are used to evaluate the performance of our proposed 3DCUN in endmember extraction and abundance estimation. The experimental results reflect that our proposed 3DCUN gets accurate results in estimating endmembers and abundances.

The performance of hyperspectral anomaly detection based on representation models is importantly related to the corresponding dictionary. A good dictionary can optimally model background to detect anomalies. To realize adaptively background reconstruction, this paper constructs global-local dictionaries for collaborative representation detector by using adaptive-shape (SA-CRD). Specifically, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is used to separate background and anomalies preliminarily. Then adaptive-shape neighbor is adopted to build local dictionaries for robust background region, and the robust background region is clustered to construct a global dictionary for potential anomaly region. Finally, global-local dictionaries are used in the collaborative representation model to finish anomaly detection. Obtained results over two real data sets indicate that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of anomaly detection intensively compared to other state-of-art methods.

Endmember estimation consists of two tasks, that is, determining the number of pure spectral constituents (endmembers) and extracting their spectral signatures. We present a new geometric distance-based method for endmember estimation from hyperspectral images (HSIs), which does not need to know the number of endmembers in advance. Our strategy optimizes the widely used maximum distance analysis (MDA) method from two viewpoints. First, the traditional MDA method performs endmember estimation by computing the maximum distances between any pixel and one specific pixel, line, plane, or affine hull (AH) composed by the endmembers that have been formerly extracted. Instead, our new strategy only requires computing the maximum distance between any pixel and one specific AH. This operation provides a simpler way than MDA to estimate endmembers. Second, our strategy exploits a new distance computation between any pixel and an AH and just needs the normal vector (compared to the traditional MDA method, which uses the normal vector and offset). The new distance computation in our method is much more efficient than that in the traditional MDA method.

Spectral unmixing plays a vital role in hyperspectral image analysis. It mainly consists of two procedures, i.e., endmember extraction and abundance estimation. Although most algorithms for each of the two procedures may exhibit good performance, few studies have been done considering both problems simultaneously. Therefore, hyperspectral unmixing accuracy is normally achieved by exploring all possible combinations of the two types of algorithms, which renders high computational overloads. We propose a novel orthogonal projection framework to conduct fast hyperspectral unmixing. It addresses both endmember extraction and abundance estimation with orthogonal projection endmember (OPE) and orthogonal projection abundance (OPA). Especially, the pixel with the largest orthogonal projection on any pixel is considered to be an endmember. We randomly choose one pixel from the hyperspectral data to compute the orthogonal projections of all pixels and extract the pixel with the largest projection as the first endmember. To avoid extracting the same endmembers, we compute orthogonal projections of all pixels to endmembers that have been previously extracted, and the pixel with the largest projection is considered as the next endmember. In terms of abundance estimation, we also utilize the concept of orthogonal projection and search for a diagonal matrix whose multiplication with the endmember matrix is not only a square matrix but also a diagonal matrix. Then, we exploit some specific matrix operations to estimate the abundance of each endmember at every pixel. We have evaluated the proposed OPE and OPA algorithms on synthetic and real data, and the experimental results have validated their effectiveness and efficiency in hyperspectral unmixing.

Anomaly detection has become an important remote sensing application due to the abundant spectral and spatial information contained in hyperspectral images. Recently, hyperspectral anomaly detection methods based on collaborative representation model have attracted significant attention. Nevertheless, these methods have to face two main challenges: (1) all features (spectral signatures) are constrained to share the same representation coefficient, which ignores the differences among features; (2) existing dictionaries for pixel-by-pixel detection model are usually not reliable. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new relaxed collaborative representation detector for hyperspectral anomaly detection by using a novel non-global dictionary. The proposed detector conducts collaborative representation on each feature dimension of the pixel under test, and simultaneously constrains the coding vectors of different features to be similar. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a detection model is built from each feature dimension. To adjust the contributions of each feature, an adaptive feature weight constrained version of the method is also proposed. The non-global dictionary is constructed by combining the k-nearest neighbor method and an existing global dictionary, which is more reliable and practical than the widely used dual windows dictionary. In addition, this paper also designs a band selection strategy for the proposed method. Experiments on five real datasets indicate that the proposed method suppresses background well and outperforms other classical and state-of-the-art methods.

Land cover classification of remotely sensed images is an extremely important and challenging task. During the last two decades, several methods have been proposed to deal with this problem. In particular, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods for land cover classification have enjoyed high popularity due to their strong feature extraction and characterization abilities. However, most CNNs-based methods use relatively small kernels (usually, 3 x 3 pixels in size). Increasing the size of the kernel introduces a lot of parameters and renders considerable computational overloads. To address this issue and allow for the processing of large image datasets, the pyramidal convolution (PyConv) network has been adopted. PyConv network contains several levels of kernels with varying scales and depths, and shows significant improvements in the task of visual recognition. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the PyConv network on the UCMERCED dataset. Our experimental results reveal that the considered approach exhibits good performance and high efficiency in the task of land cover classification.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be a powerful tool for the classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs). The CNN kernels are able to naturally include spatial information to smooth out the spectral variability and the noise present in HSI data. However, these kernels are composed of a large number of learning parameters that must be correctly adjusted to achieve good performance. This forces the model to consume a large amount of training data, being prone to overfitting when limited labeled samples are available. In addition, the execution of kernels is computationally very expensive, increasing quadratically with respect to the size of the convolution filter. This significantly reduces the performance of the model. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, this work presents a new few-parameter CNN (based on shift operations) for HSI classification that dramatically reduces both the number of parameters and the computational complexity of the model in terms of floating-point operations (FLOPs). The operational module combines a shift kernel (which adjusts the input data in particular directions without involving any parameters nor FLOPs) with pointwise convolutions that perform the feature extraction stage. The newly developed shift-based CNN has been employed to conduct HSI classification over five widely used and challenging data sets, achieving very promising results in terms of computational performance and classification accuracy.

Fast and accurate remote sensing image retrieval from large data archives has been an important research topic in the remote sensing research literature. Recently, hashing-based remote sensing image retrieval has attracted extreme attention because of its efficient search capabilities. Especially, deep remote sensing image hashing algorithms have been developed based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and have shown effective retrieval performance. However, implementing a deep hashing network tends to be highly expensive in terms of storage space and computing resources to be suitable for on-orbit remote sensing image retrieval, which usually operates on resource-limited devices such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To address this limitation, we propose to hash a deep network that in turn hashes remote sensing images. Specifically, we develop a quantized deep learning to hash (QDLH) framework for large-scale remote sensing image retrieval. The weights and activation functions in the QDLH framework are binarized to low-bit representations, which require comparatively much less storage space and computing resources. The QDLH results in a lightweight deep neural network for effective remote sensing image hashing. We conduct extensive experiments on two public remote sensing image data sets by incorporating several state-of-the-art network architectures into our QDLH methodology for remote sensing image hashing. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed QDLH is effective in saving hardware resources in terms of both storage and computation. Moreover, superior remote sensing image retrieval performance is also achieved by our QDLH, compared with state-of-the-art deep remote sensing image hashing methods.

Most existing endmember extraction techniques require prior knowledge about the number of endmembers in a hyperspectral image. The number of endmembers is normally estimated by a separate procedure, whose accuracy has a large influence on the endmember extraction performance. In order to bridge the two seemingly independent but, in fact, highly correlated procedures, we develop a new endmember estimation strategy that simultaneously counts and extracts endmembers. We consider a hyperspectral image as a hyperspectral pixel set and define the subset of pixels that are most different from one another as the divergent subset (DS) of the hyperspectral pixel set. The DS is characterized by the condition that any additional pixel would increase the likeness within the DS and, thus, reduce its divergent degree. We use the DS as the endmember set, with the number of endmembers being the subset cardinality. To render a practical computation scheme for identifying the DS, we reformulate it in terms of a quadratic optimization problem with a numerical solution. In addition to operating as an endmember estimation algorithm by itself, the DS method can also co-operate with existing endmember extraction techniques by transforming them into a novel and more effective schemes. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the DS methodology in simultaneously counting and extracting endmembers not only as an individual algorithm but also as a foundation algorithm for improving existing methods. Our full code is released for public evaluation.

We explore the use of graphical generative adversarial networks (Graphical-GAN) for synthesizing remote sensing images. The model is probabilistic graphical based generative adversarial networks (GAN). It pairs a generative network G with a recognition network R. Both of them are adversarially trained with a discriminative network D. Particularly, R is employed to infer the underlying causal relationships among both observed and latent variables from real remote sensing images. The advantages of the Graphical-GAN for synthesizing multiple categories of remote sensing images are two fold. Firstly, it considers the underlying causal relationships and captures the true data distribution of remote sensing images. Secondly, the adversarial learning generates synthetic sensing images that are similar to real ones with slight differences. Our remote sensing image synthesis scheme paves a promising way for remote sensing dataset augmentation, which is an effective means of improving the accuracy of learning models. Experimental results with high Inception Scores (IS) validate the effectiveness of the Graphical-GAN for remote sensing image synthesis.

We present a cofactor-based endmember extraction strategy for estimating green algae area in geostationary ocean color imager multispectral images. Our strategy improves the efficiency of the widely used N-FINDR endmember extraction method from two aspects. First, our strategy exploits the cofactor matrix for searching the largest simplex volume, which just computes matrix inverse and determinant for a small number of times (or even once). This is more efficient than the enumeration of determinants for all pixels in N-FINDR. Second, our strategy empirically obtains optimal endmembers through a few recursive iterations of cofactor matrix updates, contrasting a large number of repetitive volume maximizations with random initializations in N-FINDR. Experimental evaluation in terms of green algae area estimation validates that our strategy achieves the same accuracy as N-FINDR with much more efficiency.