Reconstruction of Hyperspectral Images Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract: Fast detection and identification of unknown substances is an area of interest for many parties. Raman spectroscopy is a laser-based method allowing for long range no contact investigation of substances. A Coded Aperture Snapshot Spectral Imaging (CASSI) system allows for fast and efficient measurements of hyperspectral images of a scene, containing a mixture of the spatial and spectral data. To analyze the scene and the unknown substances within it, it is required that the spectra in each spatial position are known. Utilizing the theory of compressed sensing allows for reconstruction of hyperspectral images of a scene given their CASSI measurements by assuming a sparsity prior. These reconstructions can then be utilized by a human operator to deduce and classify the unknown substances and their spatial locations in the scene. Such classifications are then applicable as decision support in various areas, for example in the judicial system. Reconstruction of hyperspectral images given CASSI-measurements is an ill-posed inverse problem typically solved by utilizing regularization techniques such as total variation (TV). These TV-based reconstruction methods are time consuming relative to the time needed to acquire the CASSI measurements, which is in the order of seconds. This leads to a reduced number of areas where the technology is applicable. In this thesis, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based reconstruction method is proposed. A GAN is trained using simulated training data consisting of hyperspectral images and their respective CASSI measurements. The GAN provides a learned prior, and is used in an iterative optimization algorithm seeking to find an optimal set of latent variables such that the reconstruction error is minimized. The results of the developed GAN based reconstruction method are compared with a traditional TV method and a different machine learning based reconstruction method.  The results show that the reconstruction method developed in this thesis performs better than the compared methods in terms of reconstruction quality in short time spans.