Simplex Volume Analysis Based on Triangular Factorization: A Framework for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Endmember extraction is a process to identify the spectra of materials from the hyperspectral scene. This paper presents a framework for endmember extraction by exploiting the ideas that: the endmembers are the vertices of the simplex, and the calculation of simplex volume can be simplified by triangular factorization. Triangular factorization is a broad conception including many methods, so the proposed framework is a group of methods including different implementations. Experimental results on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can obtain the results with better accuracy and much lower complexity, comparing to other state-of-the-art approaches.