1. Introduction
With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquired images have undergone a development process from panchromatic to multispectral to hyperspectral [
1]. Compared with panchromatic and multispectral images, hyperspectral images provide richer spectral information, which helps to identify the subtle features of the terrain objects [
2]. Recently, hyperspectral remote sensing has been widely used in various fields, such as military reconnaissance, urban planning, disaster assessment, resource exploration, and environmental monitoring [
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]. According to the platforms hyperspectral sensors carried, they can be divided into ground-based hyperspectral remote sensing systems (GHRSSs), spaceborne hyperspectral remote sensing systems (SHRSSs), and airborne hyperspectral remote sensing systems (AHRSSs). In practice, the payloads of GHRSSs could be replaced according to the requirement for data acquisition, while the GHRSSs is challenging to be widely used because of the limited data acquisition areas when they are worked. The SHRSSs could obtain data in a large area, while their payloads are tough to replace and maintain. Additionally, the area of data acquisition is limited by the satellite transit situation, and it is almost impossible to collect data in a timely manner in areas that face emergencies. The AHRSS makes up for the shortcomings of the GHRSS and the SHRSS. The payloads of AHRSSs could be replaced according to the demand in practice, allowing for capturing data rapidly in areas where the human resources are difficult to reach or involve. Moreover, the flight altitude setting of the airborne platforms is flexible, and multi-scale remote sensing data could be collected according to the requirements [
8]. The basic information of the representative AHRSS is shown in
Table 1, and it can be seen that push-broom scanning represents the mainstream of the AHRSS.
While the AHRSS captures more detailed information from the terrain objects, the computational complexity of data processing is greatly increased [
6]. As an important application technology in the hyperspectral domain, anomaly detection (AD) processing must be real-time and high-precision in many cases, such as post-disaster rescue, military battlefield search, and natural disaster detection [
9]. Methods based on deep learning, by mining the deep features of images, have emerged as a research hotspot in recent years for achieving anomaly target detection. Depending on whether annotated samples are needed, deep learning-based anomaly detection methods can be categorized into supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection. Current anomaly detection methods based on deep learning are depicted in
Table 2. Over the past few years, researchers have developed numerous methods for hyperspectral anomaly detection. However, several critical technical challenges still persist in practical applications: (1) parameter tuning, (2) algorithm generality, and (3) real-time capability [
10]. Furthermore, with the advancement of automated applications, conducting real-time anomaly detection and transmitting results to the ground for intelligent decision making has also become a pressing technological challenge that needs to be overcome. As mentioned above, push-broom scanning represents the mainstream of the AHRSS. Many related methods on the real-time AD for the push-broom AHRSS are proposed, mainly focusing on fast matrix computation, hardware design, and parallel computation [
10]. For matrix inverse adaptive calculation and optimization, some algorithms, such as the real-time recursive causality [
11], the linear algebra libraries and multicore platforms [
12], and the Cholesky decomposition and linear algebra [
11], are proposed to improve the computational efficiency of anomaly detection methods effectively. In terms of hardware design, a two-module field-programmable gate array (FPGA) [
13] based on the Reed-Xiaoli (RX) algorithm and the constrained energy minimization (CEM) algorithm is designed to transform those two algorithms according to requirements. In parallel computation, the parallel computing version of the RX detector is studied on the multicore platform [
12] and graphics processing unit (GPU) [
14], which achieve a remarkable acceleration effect in execution time.
Although these studies have made some achievements, the real-time anomaly detection for the push-broom AHRSS still faces the following difficulties: (1) the nonlinear characteristics and high dimensionality of hyperspectral images are significant, and it is difficult to extract features effectively; (2) constructing a precise representation of anomalies and background information for complex scenes is challenging, and as a result, the target detection accuracy for AHRSS is limited recently; (3) the hyperspectral image has many bands, leading to high data processing calculation and low processing efficiency; (4) the AHRSS captures more detailed information from the terrain objects, and the images have high research value. Ensuring that the downlink data retain most of the hyperspectral data information while performing real-time processing is also a problem to be considered.
In this paper, the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is studied, the mathematical model is established, and a novel implementation framework is proposed. To test the feasibility of the implementation framework, this paper designs an experiment carried out with the Airborne Multi-Modular Imaging Spectrometer (AMMIS) developed by the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics as the data acquisition platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many other AD methods (including RX detector [
12], low-probability detector (LPD) [
28], abundance- and dictionary-based low-rank decomposition (ADLR) [
29], collaborative representation detector with background purification and saliency weight (CRDBPSW) [
30], anomaly detection via integration of feature extraction and background purification (FEBPAD) [
31], and kernel isolation forest-based hyperspectral anomaly detection method (KIFD) [
32]) in anomalies detection and background suppression. Moreover, under the condition that the downlink data could retain most of the hyperspectral data information, the proposed method achieves real-time detection of pixel-level anomalies, with the initial delay not exceeding 1 s, the false alarm rate (FAR) less than 5%, and the true positive rate (TPR) close to 98%.
The main contributions of this paper are introduced as follows:
- (1)
Considering the data acquisition, data transmission/storage, and data processing of the push-broom AHRSS, the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is studied in this paper, the mathematical model of it is established, and the critical problems that need to be solved can be explained by mathematical theoretical analysis, which provides a theoretical reference for the difficulties in the push-broom AHRSS real-time AD technology.
- (2)
A novel AHRSS real-time AD implementation framework is proposed based on the mathematical model. Firstly, the optimized kernel minimum noise fraction (OP-KMNF) transformation is employed to extract informative and discriminative features between the background and anomalies. Secondly, the Nyström method is introduced to reduce the computational complexity of OP-KMNF transformation by decomposing and extrapolating the sub-kernel matrix to estimate the eigenvector of the entire kernel matrix. Thirdly, the extracted features are transferred to hard disks for data storage. Then, taking the extracted features as input data, the background separation model-based CEM anomaly detector (BSM-CEMAD) is imported to detect anomalies. Finally, graphics processing unit (GPU) parallel computing is utilized in the Nyström-based OP-KMNF (NOP-KMNF) transformation and the BSM-CEMAD to improve the execution efficiency, and the real-time AD for the push-broom AHRSS could be realized.
- (3)
To test the feasibility of the implementation framework, this paper designs an experiment carried out with the Airborne Multi-Modular Imaging Spectrometer (AMMIS) developed by the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics as the data acquisition platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many other AD methods (including RX detector, LPD, ADLR, CRDBPSW, FEBPAD, and KIFD) in anomalies detection and background suppression. Moreover, under the condition that the downlink data could retain most of the hyperspectral data information, the proposed method achieves real-time detection of pixel-level anomalies, with the initial delay not exceeding 1 s, the false alarm rate (FAR) less than 5%, and the true positive rate (TPR) close to 98%.
The remainder of the manuscript is organized as follows: In
Section 2, the proposed methods are described in detail. The experimental results are shown in
Section 3.
Section 4 analyzes and discusses the results, and conclusions are presented in
Section 5.
4. Discussion
In this paper, two experiments are designed to assess the effectiveness of the implementation framework in real-time anomaly detection for the push-broom AHRSS.
In
Section 3.4, the computational cost comparisons for NOP-KMNF-Ratio transformation and GNOP-KMNF-Ratio transformation with different data sizes are tested. The results indicate that (1) with the increase in data sizes, the acceleration effect of GNOP-KMNF transformation rather than that of NOP-KMNF-Ratio transformation and GBSM-CEMAD rather than that of BSM-CEMAD are more and more significant; (2) when the data size is 288 × 288 × 250, the execution efficiency of GNOP-KMNF transformation is about 336 times that of NOP-KMNF transformation, which shows the superior performance of the GNOP-KMNF transformation feature extraction algorithm in execution efficiency; (3) when the data size is 128 × 128 × 250, the execution efficiency of GBSM-CEMAD is about 223 times that of BSM-CEMAD, which indicates the superior performance of GBSM-CEMAD in execution efficiency. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the real-time processing, the Vehicle dataset is used as the captured image, and the runtimes of three data processing parts with different data sizes along the flight direction are tested. It can be seen that when the data size is 2048 × 250 × 160, the whole processing time of GNOP-KMNF transformation, data transmission/storage, and GBSM-CEMAD is 991.61 ms. The frame frequency of the AMMIS VNIR hyperspectral sensor is 160 Hz, the data acquisition rate is 313 MB/s, and the processing speed of the proposed method is 315.65 MB/s. In real-time processing, the hyperspectral image data of 2048 × 250 × 160 are used as a hyperspectral image cube to be processed. With the initial delay not exceeding 1 s, the real-time AD for the AMMIS VNIR hyperspectral sensor could be realized. In
Section 3.5, the experiment is designed to assess the anomaly detection capability of the proposed methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many other AD methods (including RX detector, LPD, ADLR, CRDBPSW, FEBPAD, and KIFD) in anomalies detection and background suppression. Moreover, under the condition that the downlink data could retain most of the hyperspectral data information, the proposed method achieves real-time detection of pixel-level anomalies, with the initial delay not exceeding 1 s, the FAR less than 5%, and the TPR close to 98%.
In this paper, the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is studied, and a novel implementation framework is proposed. In order to achieve high-precision real-time anomaly detection for the push-broom AHRSS, the whole implementation process of hyperspectral image acquisition, transmission, and processing is analyzed, and the mathematical model of the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is established. On this basis, the solutions to the current difficulties of this research are given from the mathematical point of view, which lays a theoretical foundation for the subsequent implementation. The processing power of GPUs is measured by the ability to perform floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). In practical applications, the processing power of GPUs depends on many factors, such as hardware architecture, number of cores, frequency, and memory bandwidth.
Figure 15 shows the thermal design power of these NVIDIA desktop GPUs, and the processing power of NVIDIA desktop GPUs since 2015 are shown in
Figure 16.
Compared with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 used in the experiments, the processing power of the most powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 on single-precision floating-point operations has increased by 12.80 times, and the processing power on double-precision floating-point operations has increased by 6.40 times. With the continuous development of GPU parallel computing technologies, the execution efficiency of the algorithm will be further improved, and the initial delay time will be effectively shortened. While for the thermal design power, the most powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 has a 2.81-fold increase compared with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 used in the experiments, how to select the hardware platform based on the careful consideration of execution efficiency and power consumption in actual flight missions still needs further discussion.
Moreover, the implementation framework designed in this paper on the real-time AD technology based on the GPU for the push-broom AHRSS is guided by practical application. In practice, the data acquisition speed by the push-broom AHRSS is affected not only by the frame frequency of the sensors, but also by the flight speed of the airborne platform. Carrying out simulation experiments only considering the push-broom AHRSS specifications is limited. It is necessary to design and conduct experiments on real-time anomaly detection for the push-broom AHRSS in combination with actual flight missions.
5. Conclusions
In this paper, the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is studied, the mathematical model is established, and a novel implementation framework is proposed. To test the feasibility of the implementation framework proposed in this paper, the experiment is carried out with the AMMIS developed by the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics as the data acquisition platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many other AD methods (including RX detector, LPD, ADLR, CRDBPSW, FEBPAD, and KIFD) in anomalies detection and background suppression. Moreover, under the condition that the downlink data could retain most of the hyperspectral data information, the proposed method achieves real-time detection of pixel-level anomalies, with the initial delay not exceeding 1 s, the FAR less than 5%, and the TPR close to 98%. Through the analysis of the critical issues involved in this research, a relatively complete implementation framework with an algorithm design and data processing for the real-time AD technology on the push-broom AHRSS is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, the mathematical model of the real-time AD technology for the push-broom AHRSS is constructed, the algorithm design and verification are carried out, and the test experiment validation is conducted. In this paper, the AMMIS developed by Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is utilized as the data acquisition sensor to carry out test experiments. While the experiments in this paper are conducted on the obtained data, we are interested in designing and conducting the experiment under the real airborne imaging environment in the future.