DWSDiff: Dual-Window Spectral Diffusion for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection (AD) has emerged as a critical area of research in hyperspectral imagery (HIS) processing, focusing on detecting sparse, small targets with spectral and spatial features deviating from the background without prior information. The approach of AD based on reconstruction differences is a leading method in deep learning (DL) for hyperspectral AD (HAD). A key challenge is the accurate estimation of complex backgrounds. The essence of this challenge lies in accurately reconstructing background regions while inferring the latent background of anomaly regions. In this article, we propose a novel method called dual-window spectral diffusion (DWSDiff) for HAD. To address the challenge of complex background estimation in HSIs, we developed a spectral diffusion model specifically tailored for HSI. This model achieves precise background estimation through an iterative spectral diffusion and reverse reconstruction process. We also introduced a dual-window strategy to mitigate the influence of anomaly extension areas within the neighborhood on background estimation. Moreover, the scarcity of paired labeled HSIs from the same scene, with and without anomalies, limits the model’s ability to learn features between anomaly and background. To address the shortage, we devised an anomaly generation strategy based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and the linear spectral mixing model (LSMM). Building on these, we designed a training and inference framework that integrates spectral diffusion, reverse background reconstruction, and target detection. Experimental results on the Airport-Beach–Urban (ABU) hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that DWSDiff outperforms 20 state-of-the-art (SOTA) HAD methods across six different areas under the curve (AUC) metrics.