Autoencoder and Adversarial-Learning-Based Semisupervised Background Estimation for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection

Reliable detection of anomalies without any prior information is a critical yet challenging task in many applications, not least military and civilian fields. An intelligent anomaly detection system would use the material-specific spectral information in hyperspectral images (HSIs), thereby avoiding the loss of visually confusing objects. However, conventional hyperspectral anomaly detection methods are mainly achieved in an unsupervised way leading to limited performance due to lack of prior knowledge. In this article, we propose a novel autoencoder and adversarial-learning based semisupervised background estimation model (SBEM) that is trained only on the background spectral samples in order to accurately learn the background distribution. In particular, an unsupervised background searching method is firstly conducted on the original HSIs to search the background spectral samples. Our proposed SBEM consists of an encoder, a decoder, and a discriminator to thoroughly capture background distribution. Furthermore, jointly minimizing the reconstruction loss, spectral loss, and adversarial loss during training aids the model to learn the background distribution as required. Experiments on four real HSIs demonstrate that compared to the current state-of-the-art, the proposed framework yields higher detection capability and lower false alarm rate, which shows that it has a significant benefit in the tradeoff between detection accuracy and false alarm rate.