Chemical detection on surfaces by hyperspectral imaging

We have developed a method for using hyperspectral (HS) data to identify and locate chemical materials on arbitrary surfaces using the materials' reflection or emission spectra that makes no prior modeling assumptions about the presence of pure pixels or the statistics of the background clutter and sensor noise. To our knowledge, this is the first time that surface detection without dependence on background information has been achieved. There are three main components to the method: (1) an HS unmixing algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers that is applied over local subsets of the imaging to resolve the HS data into a set of linearly independent spectral and spatial components; (2) the fitting of those unmixing spectra to a set of candidate template spectra; and (3) a support vector machine classifier for chemical detection, identification, and location. The algorithm is illustrated on HS data collected by a Telops Hyper-Cam infrared camera on data resulting from the deposition of chemical agent simulants on various surfaces.