Multipixel Anomaly Detection With Unknown Patterns for Hyperspectral Imagery

In this article, anomaly detection is considered for hyperspectral imagery in the Gaussian background with an unknown covariance matrix. The anomaly to be detected occupies multiple pixels with an unknown pattern. Two adaptive detectors are proposed based on the generalized likelihood ratio test design procedure and ad hoc modification of it. Surprisingly, it turns out that the two proposed detectors are equivalent. Analytical expressions are derived for the probability of false alarm of the proposed detector, which exhibits a constant false alarm rate against the noise covariance matrix. Numerical examples using simulated data reveal how some system parameters (e.g., the background data size and pixel number) affect the performance of the proposed detector. Experiments are conducted on five real hyperspectral data sets, demonstrating that the proposed detector achieves better detection performance than its counterparts.