Denoising of Hyperspectral Images Using Group Low-Rank Representation

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have been used in a wide range of fields, such as agriculture, food safety, mineralogy, and environment monitoring, but being corrupted by various kinds of noise limits its efficacy. Low-rank representation (LRR) has proved its effectiveness in the denoising of HSIs. However, it just employs local information for denoising, which results in ineffectiveness when local noise is heavy. In this paper, we propose an approach of group low-rank representation (GLRR) for the HSI denoising. In our GLRR, a corrupted HSI is divided into overlapping patches, the similar patches are combined into a group, and the group is reconstructed as a whole using LRR. The proposed method enables the exploitation of both the local similarity within a patch and the nonlocal similarity across the patches in a group simultaneously. The additional non-locally similar patches can bring in extra structural information to the corrupted patches, facilitating the detection of noise as outliers. LRR is applied to the group of patches, as the uncorrupted patches enjoy intrinsic low-rank structure. The effectiveness of the proposed GLRR method is demonstrated qualitatively and quantitatively by using both simulated and real-world data in experiments.