Entropy-Based Convex Set Optimization for Spatial-Spectral Endmember Extraction From Hyperspectral Images

Spectral unmixing is an important problem for remotely sensed hyperspectral data exploitation. Automatic spectral unmixing can be viewed as a three-stage problem, where the first stage is subspace identification, the next one is endmember extraction, and the final one is abundance estimation. In this sequence, endmember extraction is the most challenging problem. Many researchers have attempted to extract endmembers from hyperspectral images using spectral information only. However, it is well known that the inclusion of spatial information can improve the endmember extraction task. In this article, we introduce a new endmember extraction algorithm that exploits both spectral and spatial information. A main innovation of the proposed algorithm is that spatial information is exploited using entropy, while spectral information is exploited using convex set optimization. In the literature, none of the spatial-spectral algorithms has used entropy as spatial information. The inclusion of this entropy-based spatial information improves the accuracy of the endmember extraction process. The results obtained by the proposed algorithm are compared (using a variety of metrics) with those obtained by other state-of-the-art methods, using both synthetic and real datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms many available algorithms.