Datacube segmentation via deep spectral clustering

Extended vision techniques are ubiquitous in physics. However, the data cubes steaming from such analysis often pose a challenge in their interpretation, due to the intrinsic difficulty in discerning the relevant information from the spectra composing the data cube. Furthermore, the huge dimensionality of data cube spectra poses a complex task in its statistical interpretation; nevertheless, this complexity contains a massive amount of statistical information that can be exploited in an unsupervised manner to outline some essential properties of the case study at hand, e.g. it is possible to obtain an image segmentation via (deep) clustering of data-cube’s spectra, performed in a suitably defined low-dimensional embedding space. To tackle this topic, we explore the possibility of applying unsupervised clustering methods in encoded space, i.e. perform deep clustering on the spectral properties of datacube pixels. A statistical dimensional reduction is performed by an ad hoc trained (variational) AutoEncoder, in charge of mapping spectra into lower dimensional metric spaces, while the clustering process is performed by a (learnable) iterative K-means clustering algorithm. We apply this technique to two different use cases, of different physical origins: a set of macro mapping x-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) synthetic data on pictorial artworks, and a dataset of simulated astrophysical observations.