Fast hyperspectral anomaly detection via high-order 2-d crossing filter

Anomaly detection has been an important topic in hyperspectral image analysis. This technique is sometimes more preferable than the supervised target detection because it requires no a priori information for the interested materials. Many efforts have been made in this topic; however, they usually suffer from excessive time cost and a high false-positive rate. There are two major problems that lead to such a predicament. First, the construction of the background model and affinity estimation are often overcomplicated. Second, most of these methods have to impose a stringent assumption on the spectrum distribution of background; however, these assumptions cannot hold for all practical situations. Based on this consideration, this paper proposes a novel method allowing for fast yet accurate pixel-level hyperspectral anomaly detection. We claim the following main contributions: 1) construct a high-order 2-D crossing approach to find the regions of rapid change in the spectrum, which runs without any a priori assumption; and 2) design a low-complexity discrimination framework for fast hyperspectral anomaly detection, which can be implemented by a series of filtering operators with linear time cost. Experiments on three different hyperspectral images containing several pixel-level anomalies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed detector compared with the benchmark methods.