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

Nonlinear Spectral Unmixing using Semi-Supervised Standard Fuzzy Clustering

Coarse resolution captured in remote sensing causes the combination of different materials in one pixel, called the mixed pixel. Spectral unmixing estimates the combination of endmembers in mixed pixels and their corresponding abundance maps in the Hyper/Multi spectral image. In this paper, a nonlinear spectral unmixing based on semi-supervised fuzzy clustering is proposed. First, pure pixels (endmembers) using Vertex Component Analysis (VCA) are extracted and those pixels are the labelled pixels where the membership value of each is 1 for the corresponding endmember and 0 for the others. Second, the semi-supervised fuzzy clustering is applied to find the membership matrix defining the fraction of the endmember in each mixed pixel and hence extract the abundance maps. The experiments were conducted on both synthetic data such as the Legendre data and real data such as Jasper Ridge data. The non-linearity of the Legendre data was performed by the Fan model on different signal-tonoise ratio values. The results of the new unmixing model show its significant performance when compared with four state-of the art unmixing algorithm

Optimal Clustering Framework for Hyperspectral Band Selection

Band selection, by choosing a set of representative bands in hyperspectral image (HSI), is an effective method to reduce the redundant information without compromising the original contents. Recently, various unsupervised band selection methods have been proposed, but most of them are based on approximation algorithms which can only obtain suboptimal solutions toward a specific objective function. This paper focuses on clustering-based band selection, and proposes a new framework to solve the above dilemma, claiming the following contributions: 1) An optimal clustering framework (OCF), which can obtain the optimal clustering result for a particular form of objective function under a reasonable constraint. 2) A rank on clusters strategy (RCS), which provides an effective criterion to select bands on existing clustering structure. 3) An automatic method to determine the number of the required bands, which can better evaluate the distinctive information produced by certain number of bands. In experiments, the proposed algorithm is compared to some state-of-the-art competitors. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is robust and significantly outperform the other methods on various data sets

Sparse Subspace Clustering in Hyperspectral Images using Incomplete Pixels

El agrupamiento de imágenes espectrales es un método de clasificación no supervisada que identifica las distribuciones de píxeles utilizando información espectral sin necesidad de una etapa previa de entrenamiento. Los métodos basados ​​en agrupación de subespacio escasos (SSC) suponen que las imágenes hiperespectrales viven en la unión de múltiples subespacios de baja dimensión. Basado en esto, SSC asigna firmas espectrales a diferentes subespacios, expresando cada firma espectral como una combinación lineal escasa de todos los píxeles, garantizando que los elementos que no son cero pertenecen a la misma clase. Aunque estos métodos han demostrado una buena precisión para la clasificación no supervisada de imágenes hiperespectrales, a medida que aumenta el número de píxeles, es decir, la dimensión de la imagen es grande, la complejidad computacional se vuelve intratable. Por este motivo, este documento propone reducir el número de píxeles a clasificar en la imagen hiperespectral, y posteriormente, los resultados del agrupamiento para los píxeles faltantes se obtienen explotando la información espacial. Específicamente, este trabajo propone dos metodologías para remover los píxeles, la primera se basa en una distribución espacial de ruido azul que reduce la probabilidad de que se eliminen píxeles vecinos y la segunda es un procedimiento de submuestreo que elimina cada dos píxeles contiguos, preservando la estructura espacial de la escena. El rendimiento del algoritmo de agrupamiento de imágenes espectrales propuesto se evalúa en tres conjuntos de datos mostrando que se obtiene una precisión similar cuando se elimina hasta la mitad de los pixeles, además, es hasta 7.9 veces más rápido en comparación con la clasificación de los conjuntos de datos completos.Spectral image clustering is an unsupervised classification method which identifies distributions of pixels using spectral information without requiring a previous training stage. The sparse subspace clustering-based methods (SSC) assume that hyperspectral images lie in the union of multiple low-dimensional subspaces.  Using this, SSC groups spectral signatures in different subspaces, expressing each spectral signature as a sparse linear combination of all pixels, ensuring that the non-zero elements belong to the same class. Although these methods have shown good accuracy for unsupervised classification of hyperspectral images, the computational complexity becomes intractable as the number of pixels increases, i.e. when the spatial dimension of the image is large. For this reason, this paper proposes to reduce the number of pixels to be classified in the hyperspectral image, and later, the clustering results for the missing pixels are obtained by exploiting the spatial information. Specifically, this work proposes two methodologies to remove the pixels, the first one is based on spatial blue noise distribution which reduces the probability to remove cluster of neighboring pixels, and the second is a sub-sampling procedure that eliminates every two contiguous pixels, preserving the spatial structure of the scene. The performance of the proposed spectral image clustering framework is evaluated in three datasets showing that a similar accuracy is obtained when up to 50% of the pixels are removed, in addition, it is up to 7.9 times faster compared to the classification of the data sets without incomplete pixels

GETNET: A General End-to-end Two-dimensional CNN Framework for Hyperspectral Image Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is an important application of remote sensing, which provides timely change information about large-scale Earth surface. With the emergence of hyperspectral imagery, CD technology has been greatly promoted, as hyperspectral data with the highspectral resolution are capable of detecting finer changes than using the traditional multispectral imagery. Nevertheless, the high dimension of hyperspectral data makes it difficult to implement traditional CD algorithms. Besides, endmember abundance information at subpixel level is often not fully utilized. In order to better handle high dimension problem and explore abundance information, this paper presents a General End-to-end Two-dimensional CNN (GETNET) framework for hyperspectral image change detection (HSI-CD). The main contributions of this work are threefold: 1) Mixed-affinity matrix that integrates subpixel representation is introduced to mine more cross-channel gradient features and fuse multi-source information; 2) 2-D CNN is designed to learn the discriminative features effectively from multi-source data at a higher level and enhance the generalization ability of the proposed CD algorithm; 3) A new HSI-CD data set is designed for the objective comparison of different methods. Experimental results on real hyperspectral data sets demonstrate the proposed method outperforms most of the state-of-the-arts