Endmember Extraction Guided by Anomalies and Homogeneous Regions for Hyperspectral Images

Endmember extraction is the process of selecting pure spectral signatures of materials from hyperspectral data. Most of the endmember extraction methods in the literature use only the spectral information, and disregard the spatial composition of the image. Spatial-spectral preprocessing methods, motivated by the assumption that endmembers are more likely to be located in homogenous regions, can increase the performance of endmember extraction by directing the extraction process to homogenous regions. However, such an approach generally results in a failure of extracting anomalous or scarce endmembers, which can be important in practical applications, e. g., to extract endmembers of materials such as landmines, rare minerals, or stressed crops. Although anomaly detection can be applied in parallel to endmember extraction, the process of endmember extraction and unmixing provides a summary of the data, which is important for concepts such as data scanning and compression, and disregarding anomalous endmembers in such a summary or compression of big data may result in undesired consequences for many application fields. In this paper, an approach that guides the endmember extraction process to spatially homogenous regions instead of transition areas, while also extracting anomalous pixel vectors as endmembers, is proposed. The proposed approach can be used with any spectral-based endmember extraction method. The experimental results validate the approach for both synthetic and real hyperspectral images.