Autonomous Endmember Detection via an Abundance Anomaly Guided Saliency Prior for Hyperspectral Imagery

Determining the optimal number of endmember sources, which is also called “virtual dimensionality” (VD), is a priority for hyperspectral unmixing (HU). Although the VD estimation directly affects the HU results, it is usually solved independently of the HU process. In this article, a saliency-based autonomous endmember detection (SAED) algorithm is proposed to jointly estimate the VD in the process of endmember extraction (EE). In SAED, we first demonstrate that the abundance anomaly (AA) value is an important feature of undetected endmembers since pure pixels have larger AA values than “distractors” (i.e., mixed pixels and pure pixels of detected endmembers). Then, motivated by the fact that endmembers usually gather in certain local regions (superpixels) in the scene, due to spatial correlation, a superpixel prior is introduced in SAED to distinguish endmembers from noise. Specifically, the undetected endmembers are defined as visual stimuli in the AA subspace, the EE is formulated as a salient region detection problem, and the VD is automatically determined when there are no salient objects in the AA subspace. Since the spatial-contextual information of the endmembers is exploited during the saliency analysis, the proposed method is more robust than the spectral-only methods, which was verified using both real and synthetic hyperspectral images.