  Hyperspectral target detection (HTD) aims to identify specific materials
based on spectral information in hyperspectral imagery and can detect point
targets, some of which occupy a smaller than one-pixel area. However, existing
HTD methods are developed based on per-pixel binary classification, which
limits the feature representation capability for point targets. In this paper,
we rethink the hyperspectral point target detection from the object detection
perspective, and focus more on the object-level prediction capability rather
than the pixel classification capability. Inspired by the token-based
processing flow of Detection Transformer (DETR), we propose the first
specialized network for hyperspectral multi-class point object detection,
SpecDETR. Without the backbone part of the current object detection framework,
SpecDETR treats the spectral features of each pixel in hyperspectral images as
a token and utilizes a multi-layer Transformer encoder with local and global
coordination attention modules to extract deep spatial-spectral joint features.
SpecDETR regards point object detection as a one-to-many set prediction
problem, thereby achieving a concise and efficient DETR decoder that surpasses
the current state-of-the-art DETR decoder in terms of parameters and accuracy
in point object detection. We develop a simulated hyperSpectral Point Object
Detection benchmark termed SPOD, and for the first time, evaluate and compare
the performance of current object detection networks and HTD methods on
hyperspectral multi-class point object detection. SpecDETR demonstrates
superior performance as compared to current object detection networks and HTD
methods on the SPOD dataset. Additionally, we validate on a public HTD dataset
that by using data simulation instead of manual annotation, SpecDETR can detect
real-world single-spectral point objects directly.
