Implementation strategies for hyperspectral unmixing using Bayesian source separation

Bayesian Positive Source Separation (BPSS) is a useful unsupervised approach for hyperspectral data unmixing, where numerical non-negativity of spectra and abundances has to be ensured, such in remote sensing. Moreover, it is sensible to impose a sum-to-one (full additivity) constraint to the estimated source abundances in each pixel. Even though non-negativity and full additivity are two necessary properties to get physically interpretable results, the use of BPSS algorithms has been so far limited by high computation time and large memory requirements due to the Markov chain Monte Carlo calculations. An implementation strategy which allows one to apply these algorithms on a full hyperspectral image, as typical in Earth and Planetary Science, is introduced. Effects of pixel selection, the impact of such sampling on the relevance of the estimated component spectra and abundance maps, as well as on the computation times, are discussed. For that purpose, two different dataset have been used: a synthetic one and a real hyperspectral image from Mars.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing in the special issue on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing (WHISPERS

Hyperspectral Unmixing Overview: Geometrical, Statistical, and Sparse Regression-Based Approaches

Imaging spectrometers measure electromagnetic energy scattered in their instantaneous field view in hundreds or thousands of spectral channels with higher spectral resolution than multispectral cameras. Imaging spectrometers are therefore often referred to as hyperspectral cameras (HSCs). Higher spectral resolution enables material identification via spectroscopic analysis, which facilitates countless applications that require identifying materials in scenarios unsuitable for classical spectroscopic analysis. Due to low spatial resolution of HSCs, microscopic material mixing, and multiple scattering, spectra measured by HSCs are mixtures of spectra of materials in a scene. Thus, accurate estimation requires unmixing. Pixels are assumed to be mixtures of a few materials, called endmembers. Unmixing involves estimating all or some of: the number of endmembers, their spectral signatures, and their abundances at each pixel. Unmixing is a challenging, ill-posed inverse problem because of model inaccuracies, observation noise, environmental conditions, endmember variability, and data set size. Researchers have devised and investigated many models searching for robust, stable, tractable, and accurate unmixing algorithms. This paper presents an overview of unmixing methods from the time of Keshava and Mustard's unmixing tutorial [1] to the present. Mixing models are first discussed. Signal-subspace, geometrical, statistical, sparsity-based, and spatial-contextual unmixing algorithms are described. Mathematical problems and potential solutions are described. Algorithm characteristics are illustrated experimentally.Comment: This work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensin

Joint Bayesian endmember extraction and linear unmixing for hyperspectral imagery

This paper studies a fully Bayesian algorithm for endmember extraction and abundance estimation for hyperspectral imagery. Each pixel of the hyperspectral image is decomposed as a linear combination of pure endmember spectra following the linear mixing model. The estimation of the unknown endmember spectra is conducted in a unified manner by generating the posterior distribution of abundances and endmember parameters under a hierarchical Bayesian model. This model assumes conjugate prior distributions for these parameters, accounts for non-negativity and full-additivity constraints, and exploits the fact that the endmember proportions lie on a lower dimensional simplex. A Gibbs sampler is proposed to overcome the complexity of evaluating the resulting posterior distribution. This sampler generates samples distributed according to the posterior distribution and estimates the unknown parameters using these generated samples. The accuracy of the joint Bayesian estimator is illustrated by simulations conducted on synthetic and real AVIRIS images

Identifiability of the Simplex Volume Minimization Criterion for Blind Hyperspectral Unmixing: The No Pure-Pixel Case

In blind hyperspectral unmixing (HU), the pure-pixel assumption is well-known to be powerful in enabling simple and effective blind HU solutions. However, the pure-pixel assumption is not always satisfied in an exact sense, especially for scenarios where pixels are heavily mixed. In the no pure-pixel case, a good blind HU approach to consider is the minimum volume enclosing simplex (MVES). Empirical experience has suggested that MVES algorithms can perform well without pure pixels, although it was not totally clear why this is true from a theoretical viewpoint. This paper aims to address the latter issue. We develop an analysis framework wherein the perfect endmember identifiability of MVES is studied under the noiseless case. We prove that MVES is indeed robust against lack of pure pixels, as long as the pixels do not get too heavily mixed and too asymmetrically spread. The theoretical results are verified by numerical simulations