Collaborative Coupled Hyperspectral Unmixing Based Subpixel Change Detection for Analyzing Coastal Wetlands

Owing to the complicated and heterogeneous distribution characteristics of wetland features, the existing hyperspectral technology is difficult to investigate the inner-pixel subtle changes. In this article, we present a subpixel change detection method based on collaborative coupled unmixing (SCDUM) for monitoring coastal wetlands. A novel multitemporal and spatial scale collaborative endmember extraction method based on joint spatial and spectral information is proposed. In the proposed method, the multitemporal hyperspectral images are first jointly clustered and segmented based on multifeature fusion of spectral features, texture features, and shape features. Then, a different spatial scale nonnegative matrix factorization based on original and downsampled multitemporal hyperspectral images is proposed to accurately extract the pure endmembers of each segmented images. Finally, the global abundance of the multitemporal image is effectively estimated for change detection. In addition, in order to verify the accuracy of the change detection results without reference, an accuracy verification strategy by using high spatial resolution Sentinel-2A image as auxiliary data is implemented. The Yellow River Estuary coastal wetland was selected as the research area, and the Gaofen-5 and ZY-1 02D hyperspectral images were used as the research data. In particular, the proposed method not only provides the overall change information, but also obtains the component of change direction and intensity of each kind of endmember, and the experimental results show that the SCDUM gives more accurate detection results, with closer to the endmember spectral curves of real objects, compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Automated summary

In this article, a novel method for change detection in coastal wetlands using collaborative unmixing technology is proposed. By integrating spatial and spectral information, the method achieves more accurate detection results through endmember extraction and abundance estimation.