Target Detection Through Tree-Structured Encoding for Hyperspectral Images.

Target detection aims to locate targets of interest within a specific scene. The traditional model-driven detectors based on signal processing have proved to be very effective. However, the detection performance of such traditional methods relies heavily on the model assumption, which is limited by the discrepancy with real hyperspectral images (HSIs) data. In this article, a target detection method through tree-structured encoding (TD-TSE) for HSIs is proposed. Instead of modeling the target and the background to extract valid features, we construct a binary tree based on the features of the data itself and segment the HSI to improve the separability of the target and the background. For the purpose of highlighting the target and suppressing the background, a novel measurement of separation, distance on tree, is calculated via binary encoding based on the constructed tree structure, and the detection output can be obtained according to such distance. To further reduce the generalization error resulting from random subsampling, the statistical average of the distances on multiple independent trees is estimated to improve the robustness of TD-TSE. The proposed method is not constrained by any model assumptions, which is fundamentally different from the most widely used hyperspectral target detectors in the field of signal processing. Moreover, the construction of binary trees without any labeled samples and the linear complexity of the proposed method make it highly practical for the hyperspectral data in real scenes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark HSI data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TD-TSE for hyperspectral target detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]