Elliptically Contoured Distributions for Anomalous Change Detection in Hyperspectral Imagery

We derive a class of algorithms for detecting anomalous changes in hyperspectral image pairs by modeling the data with elliptically contoured (EC) distributions. These algorithms are generalizations of well-known detectors that are obtained when the EC function is Gaussian. The performance of these EC-based anomalous change detectors is assessed on real data using both real and simulated changes. In these experiments, the EC-based detectors substantially outperform their Gaussian counterparts.