3.1. Low-Rankness of Spectral Gradients
Letting the spatial coordinates be
x,
y, and spectral coordinates
z, we define “front” as the direction in which we view the
planes along the
z axis. The “top” and “side” are defined as the directions in which we view the
and
planes, respectively. Here, we define
to be a HSI with an image size of
and number of bands
B. Furthermore, we define
to be a combined 3D gradient image where the three gradient images for
(w.r.t. vertical, horizontal, and spectral directions) observed from the top view, are concatenated to form a 3D cuboid. Similarly, we define
to be the 3D cuboid of the gradient images observed from the side view. We will explain detailed formulation in
Section 3.2.
We represent the sum of ranks for all single-structure planes in
and
as follows:
where
represents the
i-th plane extracted from
and similarly
is the
i-th plane extracted from
. Given that
, which is observed from the top view, possesses size
B in the vertical direction and size
in depth, the total number of
is
. Similarly, the total number of
is
.
Since (
1) uses rank with a discrete value and is a non-convex function, the minimization problem with (
1) is NP-hard. Therefore, we incorporate the nuclear norm (
), which is the optimal relaxation of the rank constraint, and substitute
for (
1). We refer to this regularization as the Total Nuclear Norms of Gradients (TNNG). TNNG is used as regularization to approximate
and
through a low-rank model.
Figure 1 shows diagonal matrices
of the image
PaviaU, where singular value decomposition (
) is performed on some
of the HSI. The red lines show enlarged views of the top 15 singular values.
possesses singular values of
as diagonal components. In any diagonal matrix
, we can observe that there is energy concentration to a handful of singular values, and most of the values are close to 0. This observation shows that
approximately forms a low-rank structure. In
of the noisy HSI, there is energy dispersion, which violates the low-rank structure, while there is energy concentration in a portion of
in the restored HSI. Therefore, one can see that the restored image has a low-rank structure and more closely approximates the original HSI. As this property can be seen in most images, it is expected that the low-rank approximation in the gradient domain using TNNG will work for restoration.
3.2. TNNG Regularization
In this section, we design and , and specifically formulate TNNG. We redefine a HSI with an image size of and the number of bands B as a vector . A single plane represents the image of the j-th band of , and represents the transposed .
We define the linear operator
to find the spatio-spectral gradients. Let the vertical and horizontal difference operators be
, and let the spectral difference operator be
as:
where
is an identity matrix, and
is a zero matrix. Using these single-direction operators, we define the spatio-spectral difference operator
as follows:
Then, we calculate the spatio-spectral gradients of HSI,
. This procedure is illustrated in the left part of
Figure 2.
,
, and
represent the vectorized versions of the three 3D components (vertical, horizontal, and spectral, respectively) of the gradient image.
Next, we introduce two operators
, which rearrange pixels so that the upper and side planes of
are located in the front:
where
is a matrix that rotates each of
,
, and
such that the
,
, and
planes face in the directions of “front”, “side”, and “top”, respectively, and similarly
has a role of rotating the cuboids such that the
,
, and
planes faces in the directions of “front”, “side”, and “top”, respectively (see the right part of
Figure 2). In addition, we use the operator
, which converts a vector into a 3D cuboid, to rewrite the vectors
as follows:
The right side of
Figure 2 shows an image diagram when
and
are designed using
,
, and
. Rewriting (
2) using
,
, and
defined by (
4) and (
5), TNNG in (
2) is expressed as follows:
where
represents the nuclear norm of the
i-th plane in the 3D cuboid
.
3.3. HSI Restoration Model
In this section, we formulate an image restoration problem. The HSI observation model is represented by the following equation using an original image
and an observed image
:
where
is the linear operator that represents deterioration (for example, it represents random sampling in the case of compressed sensing [
37,
38]), and
represents additive noise. Based on the observation model, the convex optimization problem for the HSI restoration using TNNG can be formulated as follows:
Here,
is the weight of TNNG,
represents the box constraint of the pixel values in the closed convex set, and
,
represent the minimum and maximum pixel values taken by
, respectively. In addition,
is a data-fidelity function, and it is necessary to select a suitable
depending on the observed distribution of noise. We assume that the additive noise follows a Gaussian distribution, and thus we use the
-norm to express the convex optimization problem of Problem (
9) as follows:
3.4. Gradient-Based Robust Principal Component Analysis
We apply TNNG to 3D Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA). RPCA [
39] has been used in many computer vision and image processing applications. The goal of RPCA in the case of 2D images is to decompose an image matrix
to a low-rank component
and a sparse residual
by solving the following equation:
We extend this to HSI image decomposition by applying TNNG as follows:
By solving (
12), we achieve the decomposition of the observed measurement
as
, where
is low-rank in the gradient domain, and
is the sparse component. The two constraints in (
12) guarantee the exact reconstruction and the reasonable range of pixel values. Unlike the existing 3D RPCA methods [
40,
41], we analyze the low-rankness of an HSI in the gradient domain. As it is gradient-based, it also has the capability of excluding sparse anomalies more sensitively, so it is expected that the performance of the decomposition improves. We call this Gradient-based RPCA (GRPCA). This problem is also convex optimization, and thus one efficiently obtains a global optimum solution by convex optimization algorithms.
3.5. HSI Pansharpening Model
Pan sharpening is a technique for generating an HSI with high spatial and spectral resolutions by combining a panchromatic image (pan image) with a high spatial resolution and a HSI with a high spectral resolution. It is important in the field of remote sensing and earth observation.
Let
be a true HSI with high spatial resolution,
be an observed HSI with low spatial resolution, and
be an observed gray-scale pan image. The observation model of HSI for pansharpening can be formulated as follows:
where
and
represent the lowpass operator and sub-sampling operator, respectively. The matrix
represents an average operator. In our setting, we simply average all bands to makes a gray-scale image.
and
represent additive noise.
The goal of the pansharpening problem is to recover the full spatial and spectral resolution image
, which is similar to
, from the observed two images
and
. Using the proposed regularization defined by (
7), we adopt the following convex optimization problem to estimate
.
where
and
are user-defined parameters that controls the fidelity of
.
3.6. Optimization
In this study, we adopt primal-dual splitting (PDS) [
25] to solve the convex optimization problems in (
10), (
12), and (
14). PDS is an iterative algorithm to solve a convex optimization problem of the form
where
F represents a convex function where the gradient is
-Lipschitz continuous and differentiable,
G and
H represent the non-smooth convex functions where the proximity operator can be efficiently calculated, and
is a linear operator. Proximity operator [
42,
43] is defined using the lower semi-continuous convex function
and index
, as
The PDS algorithm to solve Problem (
15) is given as follows [
25,
44,
45]:
where
is the gradient of
F,
is the primal variable,
is the dual variable of
,
is the mediator variable to calculate
, and the superscript
indicates the
k-th iteration. The algorithm converges to an optimal solution of Problem (
15) by iteratively solving (
17) under appropriate conditions on
and
.
In the paper, we explain only the procedure to solve Problem (
10), but one can also solve Problem (
12) and (
14) in a similar way. The respective algorithms are shown in shown in Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2. To apply PDS to Problem (
10), we define the indicator function
with a closed convex set as follows:
We use this indicator function to turn Problem (
10) into a convex optimization problem with no apparent constraints as follows:
Problem (
19) is formed by the convex functions allowing efficient calculation of the proximity operator. To represent (
19) in the same format as Problem (
15), to which PDS can be applied, we separate each term of Problem (
19) into
F,
G, and
H as follows:
The function
is formed only by the differentiable
-norm, and thus its gradient
is obtained by
The function
becomes the indicator function
. The
of (
17) becomes
, the projection that is the proximity operator to the box constraint. If we set the projection to
, then the projection
can be given, for
, as follows:
We perform the operation separately for each element
in
. The function
corresponds to the regularization function, and the dual variable
and linear operator
can be given as follows:
Here,
and
are dual variables corresponding to
and
, respectively. Given that TNNG uses a nuclear norm, the
performs soft-thresholding with respect to singular values of each matrix
in (
7). Here, the singular value decomposition of
becomes
. Thus, the proximity operator,
is given as follows:
where
represents a diagonal matrix with diagonal elements
, and
M is the maximum number of singular values.
Based on the above discussion, we can solve the convex optimization problem of Problem (
10) using PDS, whose steps are shown in Algorithm 3. The calculation for the projection
(step 4) is indicated in (
22), and the proximity operator of nuclear norms (steps 7, 8) is given by (
24). We set the stopping criterion to
.
Algorithm 1 PDS Algorithm for Solving Problem (12) |
- 1:
input : , - 2:
set : , and initial values for , , , are given. - 3:
while a stopping criterion is not satisfied do - 4:
; - 5:
; - 6:
; - 7:
; - 8:
; - 9:
; - 10:
; - 11:
; - 12:
; - 13:
; - 14:
Update iteration: ; - 15:
end while - 16:
output :
|
We turn Problem (
12) into a convex optimization problem with no apparent constraints as follows:
Problem (
25) is formed by the convex functions allowing efficient calculation of the proximity operator. To represent (
25) in the same format as Problem (
15), to which PDS can be applied, we separate each term of Problem (
25) into
F,
G, and
H as follows:
Steps 12 of Algorithm 1 is the proximity operator,
is given as follows:
for i = 1,...,NB, where
denotes the sign of
,
is
.
We turn Problem (
14) into a convex optimization problem with no apparent constraints as follows:
Problem (
28) is formed by the convex functions allowing efficient calculation of the proximity operator. To represent (
28) in the same format as Problem (
15), to which PDS can be applied, we separate each term of Problem (
28) into
F,
G, and
H as follows:
Algorithm 2 PDS Algorithm for Solving Problem (14) |
- 1:
input : - 2:
set : , and initial values for , , , are given. - 3:
while a stopping criterion is not satisfied do - 4:
; - 5:
; - 6:
; - 7:
; - 8:
; - 9:
; - 10:
; - 11:
; - 12:
; - 13:
Update iteration: ; - 14:
end while - 15:
output :
|
Steps 12 and 13 of Algorithm 2 is updated by using the following
ball projection:
where
is the radius of the
-norm sphere. And,
is define as
.
Algorithm 3: PDS Algorithm for Solving Problem (10) |
- 1:
input : - 2:
set : , and initial values for , are given. - 3:
whilea stopping criterion is not satisfieddo - 4:
; - 5:
; - 6:
; - 7:
; - 8:
; - 9:
Update iteration: ; - 10:
end while - 11:
output :
|