Deep Spatial-Spectral Joint-Sparse Prior Encoding Network for Hyperspectral Target Detection

Hyperspectral target detection aims to locate targets of interest in the scene, and deep learning-based detection methods have achieved the best results. However, black box network architectures are usually designed to directly learn the mapping between the original image and the discriminative features in a single data-driven manner, a choice that lacks sufficient interpretability. On the contrary, this article proposes a novel deep spatial-spectral joint-sparse prior encoding network (JSPEN), which reasonably embeds the domain knowledge of hyperspectral target detection into the neural network, and has explicit interpretability. In JSPEN, the sparse encoded prior information with spatial-spectral constraints is learned end-to-end from hyperspectral images (HSIs). Specifically, an adaptive joint spatial-spectral sparse model (AS2JSM) is developed to mine the spatial-spectral correlation of HSIs and improves the accuracy of data representation. An optimization algorithm is designed for iteratively solving AS2JSM, and JSPEN is proposed to simulate the iterative optimization process in the algorithm. Each basic module of JSPEN one-to-one corresponds to the operation in the optimization algorithm so that each intermediate result in the network has a clear explanation, which is convenient for intuitive analysis of the operation of the network. With end-to-end training, JSPEN can automatically capture the general sparse properties of HSIs and faithfully characterize the features of background and target. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/Jiahuiqu/JSPEN.