Hyperspectral Target Detection Based on Interpretable Representation Network

Hyperspectral target detection (HTD) is an important issue in Earth observation, with applications in both military and civilian domains. However, conventional representation-based detectors are hindered by the reliance on the unknown background dictionary, the limited ability to capture nonlinear representations using the linear mixture model (LMM), and the insufficient background-target recognition based on handcrafted priors. To address these problems, this article proposes an interpretable representation network that intuitively realizes LMM for HTD, making nonlinear feature expression and physical interpretability compatible. Specifically, a subspace representation network is designed to separate the background and target components, where the background subspace can be adaptively learned. In addition, to further enhance the nonlinear representation and more accurately learn the coefficients, a lightweight multiscale Transformer is proposed by modeling long-distance feature dependencies between channels. Furthermore, to supplement the depiction for target–background discrimination, a constrained energy minimization (CEM) loss is tailored by minimizing the output background energy and maximizing the target response. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on four benchmark datasets, showing its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/shendb2022/HTD-IRN for reproducibility purposes.