Spectral-Spatial Hyperspectral Unmixing Using Multitask Learning

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important and challenging task in the field of remote sensing which arises when the spatial resolution of sensors is insufficient for the separation of spectrally distinct materials. Hyperspectral images, like other natural images, have highly correlated pixels and it is very desirable to make use of this spatial information. In this paper, a deep learning based method for blind hyperspectral unmixing is presented. The method uses multitask learning through multiple parallel autoencoders to unmix a neighborhood of pixels simultaneously. Operating on image patches instead of single pixels enables the method to take advantage of spatial information in the hyperspectral image. The method is the first in its class to directly utilize the spatial structure of hyperspectral images (HSIs) for the estimation of the spectral signatures of endmembers in the data cube. We evaluate the proposed method using two real HSIs and compare it to seven state-of-the-art methods that either rely only on spectral or both on spectral and spatial information in the HSIs. The proposed method outperforms all the baseline unmixing methods in experiments.