Phase-Locked SNR Band Selection for Weak Mineral Signal Detection in Hyperspectral Imagery
This work addresses the challenge of weak mineral detection in geological hyperspectral imaging, offering an incremental improvement for domain-specific applications.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting weak mineral signatures in hyperspectral imagery by proposing a two-stage framework that integrates phase-locked SNR band selection and spectral smoothing, resulting in improved unmixing accuracy and enhanced detection of weak mineral zones.
Hyperspectral imaging offers detailed spectral information for mineral mapping; however, weak mineral signatures are often masked by noisy and redundant bands, limiting detection performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage integrated framework for enhanced mineral detection in the Cuprite mining district. In the first stage, we compute the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for each spectral band and apply a phase-locked thresholding technique to discard low-SNR bands, effectively removing redundancy and suppressing background noise. Savitzky-Golay filtering is then employed for spectral smoothing, serving a dual role first to stabilize trends during band selection, and second to preserve fine-grained spectral features during preprocessing. In the second stage, the refined HSI data is reintroduced into the model, where KMeans clustering is used to extract 12 endmember spectra (W1 custom), followed by non negative least squares (NNLS) for abundance unmixing. The resulting endmembers are quantitatively compared with laboratory spectra (W1 raw) using cosine similarity and RMSE metrics. Experimental results confirm that our proposed pipeline improves unmixing accuracy and enhances the detection of weak mineral zones. This two-pass strategy demonstrates a practical and reproducible solution for spectral dimensionality reduction and unmixing in geological HSI applications.