Nonlocal Total Variation Subpixel Mapping for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Imagery

Subpixel mapping is a method of enhancing the spatial resolution of images, which involves dividing a mixed pixel into subpixels and assigning each subpixel to a definite land-cover class. Traditionally, subpixel mapping is based on the assumption of spatial dependence, and the spatial correlation information among pixels and subpixels is considered in the prediction of the spatial locations of land-cover classes within the mixed pixels. In this paper, a novel subpixel mapping method for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery based on a nonlocal method, namely nonlocal total variation subpixel mapping (NLTVSM), is proposed to use the nonlocal self-similarity prior to improve the performance of the subpixel mapping task. Differing from the existing spatial regularization subpixel mapping technique, in NLTVSM, the nonlocal total variation is used as a spatial regularizer to exploit the similar patterns and structures in the image. In this way, the proposed method can obtain an optimal subpixel mapping result and accuracy by considering the nonlocal spatial information. Compared with the classical and state-of-the-art subpixel mapping approaches, the experimental results using a simulated hyperspectral image, two synthetic hyperspectral remote sensing images, and a real hyperspectral image confirm that the proposed algorithm can obtain better results in both visual and quantitative evaluations