A New Algorithm for Bilinear Spectral Unmixing of Hyperspectral Images Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Spectral unmixing is an important technique for exploiting hyperspectral data. The presence of nonlinear mixing effects poses an important problem when attempting to provide accurate estimates of the abundance fractions of pure spectral components (endmembers) in a scene. This problem complicates the development of algorithms that can address all types of nonlinear mixtures in the scene. In this paper, we develop a new strategy to simultaneously estimate both the endmember signatures and their corresponding abundances using a biswarm particle swarm optimization (BiPSO) bilinear unmixing technique based on Fan's model. Our main motivation in this paper is to explore the potential of the newly proposed bilinearmixture model based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for nonlinear spectral unmixing purposes. By taking advantage of the learning mechanism provided by PSO, we embed a multiobjective optimization technique into the algorithm to handle the more complex constraints in simplex volume minimization algorithms for spectral unmixing, thus avoiding limitations due to penalty factors. Our experimental results, conducted using both synthetic and real hyperspectral data, demonstrate that the proposed BiPSO algorithm can outperform other traditional spectral unmixing techniques by accounting for nonlinearities in the mixtures present in the scene.