Differentiable Programming for Physics-based Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important remote sensing task with applications including material identification and analysis. Characteristic spectral features make many pure materials identifiable from their visible-to-infrared spectra, but quantifying their presence within a mixture is a challenging task due to nonlinearities and factors of variation. In this thesis, physics-based approaches are incorporated into an end-to-end spectral unmixing algorithm via differentiable programming. First, sparse regularization and constraints are implemented by adding differentiable penalty terms to a cost function to avoid unrealistic predictions. Secondly, a physics-based dispersion model is introduced to simulate realistic spectral variation, and an efficient method to fit the parameters is presented. Then, this dispersion model is utilized as a generative model within an analysis-by-synthesis spectral unmixing algorithm. Further, a technique for inverse rendering using a convolutional neural network to predict parameters of the generative model is introduced to enhance performance and speed when training data are available. Results achieve state-of-the-art on both infrared and visible-to-near-infrared (VNIR) datasets as compared to baselines, and show promise for the synergy between physics-based models and deep learning in hyperspectral unmixing in the future.