Endmember Bundle Extraction based on Multi-objective Optimization

Abstract

A number of endmember extraction methods have been developed to identify pure pixels in hyperspectral images (HSIs). The majority of them use only one spectrum to represent one kind of material, which ignores the spectral variability problem that particularly characterizes a HSI with high spatial resolution. Only a few algorithms have been developed to identify multiple endmembers representing the spectral variability within each class, called endmember bundle extraction (EBE). This article introduces multiobjective particle swarm optimization for the identification of multiple endmember spectra with variability. Unlike existing convex geometry-based EBE methods, which operate on a single geometry of the dataspace, the proposed method divides the observed data into subsets along the spectral dimension and simultaneously operates on multiple dataspaces to obtain candidate endmembers based on multiobjective particle swarm optimization. The candidate endmembers are then refined by spatial post-processing and sequential forward floating selection to produce the final result. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods.