Graph Evolution-Based Vertex Extraction for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a fundamental task in hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. However, most existing methods rely on pixel feature vectors and overlook the relational structure information between pixels, limiting the detection performance. In this article, we propose a novel approach to hyperspectral anomaly detection that characterizes the HSI data using a vertex-and edge-weighted graph with the pixels as vertices. The constructed graph encodes rich structural information in an affinity matrix. A crucial innovation of our method is the ability to obtain internal relations between pixels at multiple topological scales by processing different powers of the affinity matrix. This power processing is viewed as a graph evolution, which enables anomaly detection using vertex extraction formulated as a quadratic programming problem on graphs of varying topological scales. We also design a hierarchical guided filtering architecture to fuse multiscale detection results derived from graph evolution, which significantly reduces the false alarm rate. Our approach effectively characterizes the topological properties of HSIs, leveraging the structural information between pixels to improve anomaly detection accuracy. Experimental results on four real HSIs demonstrate the superior detection performance of our proposed approach compared to some state-of-the-art hyperspectral anomaly detection methods.