Synthesis of Synthetic Hyperspectral Images with Controllable Spectral Variability Using a Generative Adversarial Network

In hyperspectral unmixing (HU), spectral variability in hyperspectral images (HSIs) is a major challenge which has received a lot of attention over the last few years. Here, we propose a method utilizing a generative adversarial network (GAN) for creating synthetic HSIs having a controllable degree of realistic spectral variability from existing HSIs with established ground truth abundance maps. Such synthetic images can be a valuable tool when developing HU methods that can deal with spectral variability. We use a variational autoencoder (VAE) to investigate how the variability in the synthesized images differs from the original images and perform blind unmixing experiments on the generated images to illustrate the effect of increasing the variability.