DSP design for real-time hyperspectral target detection based on spatial-spectral information extraction

Military target detection is an important application of hyperspectral remote sensing. It highly demands real-time or near real-time processing. However, the massive amount of hyperspectral image data seriously limits the processing speed. Real-time image processing based on hardware platform, such as digital signal processor (DSP), is one of recent developments in hyperspectral target detection. In hyperspectral target detection algorithms, correlation matrix or covariance matrix calculation is always used to whiten data, which is a very time-consuming process. In this paper, a strategy named spatial-spectral information extraction (SSIE) is presented to accelerate the speed of hyperspectral image processing. The strategy is composed of bands selection and sample covariance matrix estimation. Bands selection fully utilizes the high-spectral correlation in spectral image, while sample covariance matrix estimation fully utilizes the high-spatial correlation in remote sensing image. Meanwhile, this strategy is implemented on the hardware platform of DSP. The hardware implementation of constrained energy minimization (CEM) algorithm is composed of hardware architecture and software architecture. The hardware architecture contains chips and peripheral interfaces, and software architecture establishes a data transferring model to accomplish the communication between DSP and PC. In experiments, the performance on software of ENVI with that on hardware of DSP is compared. Results show that the processing speed and recognition result on DSP are better than those on ENVI. Detection results demonstrate that the strategy implemented by DSP is sufficient to enable near real-time supervised target detection.