Extraction of Endmembers From Hyperspectral Images Using A Weighted Fuzzy Purified-Means Clustering Model

Hyperspectral endmembers are the spectra of pure materials that are responsible for generating the mixed pixels in hyperspectral images (HSIs). Hyperspectral endmember extraction (HEE) is essentially an inverse problem, where the unknown endmembers are inferred from the spectral measurements. Efficient extraction of endmembers in HSI relies on a well-defined generative model that captures key factors in HSI generation process, such as the clustering effect in the spatial domain and the noise heterogeneity effect in the spectral domain. This paper presents a weighted fuzzy purified-means (WFPmeans) clustering model for HEE, where the endmembers are modeled as mean vectors of individual classes, and the fractional contributions of individual endmembers, called abundances, are treated as soft class membership. Accordingly, an endmember is estimated as the weighted mean of purified pixels in HSI, while the abundances are estimated as the nonnegative regression coefficients. In contrast to a mixed pixel that consists of multiple endmembers, a “purified pixel” is due to a single endmember. The introduction of the concept of “purified pixels” into the fuzzy clustering model leads to an elegant optimization scheme. Moreover, the proposed model accounts for the noise variance heterogeneity issue, which is essential for achieving unbiased abundance estimation. The proposed method is tested on both simulated and real HSI, in comparison with several other HEE methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably with respect to the referenced methods in terms of both endmember and abundance estimation.