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We propose a simple yet efficient sparse unmixing method for hyperspectral images. It exploits the spatial and spectral properties of hyperspectral images by designing a new regularization informed by multiscale analysis. The proposed approach consists of two steps. First, a sparse unmixing is conducted on a coarse hyperspectral image resulting from a spatial smoothing of the original data. The estimated coarse abundance map is subsequently used to design two weighting terms summarizing the spatial and spectral properties of the image. They are combined to define a sparse regularization embedded into a unmixing problem associated with the original hyperspectral image at full resolution. The performance of the proposed method is assessed with numerous experiments conducted on synthetic and real datasets. It is shown to compete favorably with state-of-the-art methods from the literature with lower computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral unmixing aims at identifying a set of elementary spectra and the corresponding mixture coefficients for each pixel of an image. As the elementary spectra correspond to the reflectance spectra of real materials, they are often very correlated, thus yielding an ill-conditioned problem. To enrich the model and reduce ambiguity due to the high correlation, it is common to introduce spatial information to complement the spectral information. The most common way to introduce spatial information is to rely on a spatial regularization of the abundance maps. In this article, instead of considering a simple but limited regularization process, spatial information is directly incorporated through the newly proposed context of spatial unmixing. Contextual features are extracted for each pixel, and this additional set of observations is decomposed according to a linear model. Finally, the spatial and spectral observations are unmixed jointly through a cofactorization model. In particular, this model introduces a coupling term used to identify clusters of shared spatial and spectral signatures. An evaluation of the proposed method is conducted on synthetic and real data and shows that results are accurate and also very meaningful since they describe both spatially and spectrally the various areas of the scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factor analysis has proven to be a relevant tool for extracting tissue time-activity curves (TACs) in dynamic PET images, since it allows for an unsupervised analysis of the data. Reliable and interpretable results are possible only if it is considered with respect to suitable noise statistics. However, the noise in reconstructed dynamic PET images is very difficult to characterize, despite the Poissonian nature of the count rates. Rather than explicitly modeling the noise distribution, this paper proposes to study the relevance of several divergence measures to be used within a factor analysis framework. To this end, the $\beta $ -divergence, widely used in other applicative domains, is considered to design the data-fitting term involved in three different factor models. The performances of the resulting algorithms are evaluated for different values of $\beta $ , in a range covering Gaussian, Poissonian, and Gamma-distributed noises. The results obtained on two different types of synthetic images and one real image show the interest of applying non-standard values of $\beta $ to improve the factor analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral variability is one of the major issues when conducting hyperspectral unmixing. Within a given image composed of some elementary materials (herein referred to as endmember classes), the spectral signatures characterizing these classes may spatially vary due to intrinsic component fluctuations or external factors (illumination). These redundant multiple endmember spectra within each class adversely affect the performance of unmixing methods. This paper proposes a mixing model that explicitly incorporates a hierarchical structure of redundant multiple spectra representing each class. The proposed method is designed to promote sparsity on the selection of both spectra and classes within each pixel. The resulting unmixing algorithm is able to adaptively recover several bundles of endmember spectra associated with each class and robustly estimate abundances. In addition, its flexibility allows a variable number of classes to be present within each pixel of the hyperspectral image to be unmixed. The proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art unmixing methods that incorporate sparsity using both simulated and real hyperspectral data. The results show that the proposed method can successfully determine the variable number of classes present within each class and estimate the corresponding class abundances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, the problem of unmixing large or multitemporal hyperspectral data sets has been specifically addressed in the remote sensing literature only by a few dedicated strategies. Among them, some attempts have been made within a distributed estimation framework, in particular, relying on the alternating direction method of multipliers. In this paper, we propose to study the interest of a partially asynchronous distributed unmixing procedure based on a recently proposed asynchronous algorithm. Under standard assumptions, the proposed algorithm inherits its convergence properties from recent contributions in nonconvex optimization, while allowing the problem of interest to be efficiently addressed. Comparisons with a distributed synchronous counterpart of the proposed unmixing procedure allow its interest to be assessed on synthetic and real data. Besides, thanks to its genericity and flexibility, the procedure investigated in this paper can be implemented to address various matrix factorization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral unmixing (SU) methods incorporating the spatial regularizations have demonstrated increasing interest. Although spatial regularizers that promote smoothness of the abundance maps have been widely used, they may overly smooth these maps and, in particular, may not preserve edges present in the hyperspectral image. Existing unmixing methods usually ignore these edge structures or use edge information derived from the hyperspectral image itself. However, this information may be affected by the large amounts of noise or variations in illumination, leading to erroneous spatial information incorporated into the unmixing procedure. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful SU framework that incorporates external data [i.e. light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data]. The LiDAR measurements can be easily exploited to adjust the standard spatial regularizations applied to the unmixing process. The proposed framework is rigorously evaluated using two simulated data sets and a real hyperspectral image. It is compared with methods that rely on spatial information derived from a hyperspectral image. The results show that the proposed framework can provide better abundance estimates and, more specifically, can significantly improve the abundance estimates for the pixels affected by shadows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change detection (CD) is one of the most challenging issues when analyzing remotely sensed images. Comparing several multidate images acquired through the same kind of sensor is the most common scenario. Conversely, designing robust, flexible, and scalable algorithms for CD becomes even more challenging when the images have been acquired by two different kinds of sensors. This situation arises in the case of emergency under critical constraints. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first strategy to deal with optical images characterized by dissimilar spatial and spectral resolutions. Typical considered scenarios include CD between panchromatic, multispectral, and hyperspectral images. The proposed strategy consists of a three-step procedure: 1) inferring a high spatial and spectral resolution image by fusion of the two observed images characterized one by a low spatial resolution and the other by a low spectral resolution; 2) predicting two images with, respectively, the same spatial and spectral resolutions as the observed images by the degradation of the fused one; and 3) implementing a decision rule to each pair of observed and predicted images characterized by the same spatial and spectral resolutions to identify changes. To quantitatively assess the performance of the method, an experimental protocol is specifically designed, relying on synthetic yet physically plausible change rules applied to real images. The accuracy of the proposed framework is finally illustrated on real images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piecewise constant denoising can be solved either by deterministic optimization approaches, based on the Potts model, or by stochastic Bayesian procedures. The former lead to low computational time but require the selection of a regularization parameter, whose value significantly impacts the achieved solution, and whose automated selection remains an involved and challenging problem. Conversely, fully Bayesian formalisms encapsulate the regularization parameter selection into hierarchical models, at the price of high computational costs. This contribution proposes an operational strategy that combines hierarchical Bayesian and Potts model formulations, with the double aim of automatically tuning the regularization parameter and maintaining computational efficiency. The proposed procedure relies on formally connecting a Bayesian framework to a $\ell _2$ -Potts functional. Behaviors and performance for the proposed piecewise constant denoising and regularization parameter tuning techniques are studied qualitatively and assessed quantitatively, and shown to compare favorably against those of a fully Bayesian hierarchical procedure, both in accuracy and computational load. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The problem of band selection (BS) is of great importance to handle the curse of dimensionality for hyperspectral image (HSI) applications (e.g., classification). This letter proposes an unsupervised BS approach based on a split-and-merge concept. This new approach provides relevant spectral sub-bands by splitting the adjacent bands without violating the physical meaning of the spectral data. Next, it merges highly correlated bands and sub-bands to reduce the dimensionality of the HSI. Experiments on three public data sets and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches show the efficiency of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sparse representations have proven their efficiency in solving a wide class of inverse problems encountered in signal and image processing. Conversely, enforcing the information to be spread uniformly over representation coefficients exhibits relevant properties in various applications such as robust encoding in digital communications. Antisparse regularization can be naturally expressed through an \ell \infty -norm penalty. This paper derives a probabilistic formulation of such representations. A new probability distribution, referred to as the democratic prior, is first introduced. Its main properties as well as three random variate generators for this distribution are derived. Then this probability distribution is used as a prior to promote antisparsity in a Gaussian linear model, yielding a fully Bayesian formulation of antisparse coding. Two Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are proposed to generate samples according to the posterior distribution. The first one is a standard Gibbs sampler. The second one uses Metropolis–Hastings moves that exploit the proximity mapping of the log-posterior distribution. These samples are used to approximate maximum a posteriori and minimum mean square error estimators of both parameters and hyperparameters. Simulations on synthetic data illustrate the performances of the two proposed samplers, for both complete and over-complete dictionaries. All results are compared to the recent deterministic variational FITRA algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a multiband image fusion algorithm based on unsupervised spectral unmixing for combining a high-spatial–low-spectral-resolution image and a low-spatial–high-spectral-resolution image. The widely used linear observation model (with additive Gaussian noise) is combined with the linear spectral mixture model to form the likelihoods of the observations. The nonnegativity and sum-to-one constraints resulting from the intrinsic physical properties of the abundances are introduced as prior information to regularize this ill-posed problem. The joint fusion and unmixing problem is then formulated as maximizing the joint posterior distribution with respect to the endmember signatures and abundance maps. This optimization problem is attacked with an alternating optimization strategy. The two resulting subproblems are convex and are solved efficiently using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Experiments are conducted for both synthetic and semi-real data. Simulation results show that the proposed unmixing-based fusion scheme improves both the abundance and endmember estimation compared with the state-of-the-art joint fusion and unmixing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This letter proposes a robust fast multiband image fusion method to merge a high-spatial low-spectral resolution image and a low-spatial high-spectral resolution image. Following the method recently developed by Wei et al., the generalized Sylvester matrix equation associated with the multiband image fusion problem is solved in a more robust and efficient way by exploiting the Woodbury formula, avoiding any permutation operation in the frequency domain as well as the blurring kernel invertibility assumption required in their method. Thanks to this improvement, the proposed algorithm requires fewer computational operations and is also more robust with respect to the blurring kernel compared with the one developed by Wei et al. The proposed new algorithm is tested with different priors considered by Wei et al. Our conclusion is that the proposed fusion algorithm is more robust than the one by Wei et al. with a reduced computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]