A new low-rank representation based hyperspectral image denoising method for mineral mapping

Abstract

Hyperspectral imaging technology has been used for geological analysis for many years wherein mineral mapping is the dominant application for hyperspectral images (HSIs). The very high spectral resolution of HSIs enables the identification and the diagnosis of different minerals with detection accuracy far beyond that offered by multispectral images. However, HSIs are inevitably corrupted by noise during acquisition and transmission processes. The presence of noise may significantly degrade the quality of the extracted mineral information. In order to improve the accuracy of mineral mapping, denoising is a crucial pre-processing task. By leveraging on low-rank and self-similarity properties of HSIs, this paper proposes a state-of-the-art HSI denoising algorithm that implements two main steps: (1) signal subspace learning via fine-tuned Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA); and (2) denoising the images associated with the representation coefficients, with respect to an orthogonal subspace basis, using BM3D, a self-similarity based state-of-the-art denoising algorithm. Accordingly, the proposed algorithm is named Hyperspectral Denoising via Robust principle component analysis and Self-similarity (HyDRoS), which can be considered as a supervised version of FastHyDe. The effectiveness of HyDRoS is evaluated in a series of mineral mapping experiments using noise-reduced AVIRIS and Hyperion HSIs. In these experiments, the proposed denoiser yielded systematically state-of-the-art performance.