  In this work, a novel target detector for hyperspectral imagery is developed.
The detector is independent on the unknown covariance matrix, behaves well in
large dimensions, distributional free, invariant to atmospheric effects, and
does not require a background dictionary to be constructed. Based on a
modification of the robust principal component analysis (RPCA), a given
hyperspectral image (HSI) is regarded as being made up of the sum of a low-rank
background HSI and a sparse target HSI that contains the targets based on a
pre-learned target dictionary specified by the user. The sparse component is
directly used for the detection, that is, the targets are simply detected at
the non-zero entries of the sparse target HSI. Hence, a novel target detector
is developed, which is simply a sparse HSI generated automatically from the
original HSI, but containing only the targets with the background is
suppressed. The detector is evaluated on real experiments, and the results of
which demonstrate its effectiveness for hyperspectral target detection
especially when the targets are well matched to the surroundings.
