Unsupervised Nonlinear Hyperspectral Unmixing with Reduced Spectral Variability via Superpixel-Based Fisher Transformation

Abstract

In hyperspectral unmixing, dealing with nonlinear mixing effects and spectral variability (SV) is a significant challenge. Traditional linear unmixing can be seriously deteriorated by the coupled residuals of nonlinearity and SV in remote sensing scenarios. For the simplification of calculation, current unmixing studies usually separate the consideration of nonlinearity and SV. As a result, errors individually caused by the nonlinearity or SV still persist, potentially leading to overfitting and the decreased accuracy of estimated endmembers and abundances. In this paper, a novel unsupervised nonlinear unmixing method accounting for SV is proposed. First, an improved Fisher transformation scheme is constructed by combining an abundance-driven dynamic classification strategy with superpixel segmentation. It can enlarge the differences between different types of pixels and reduce the differences between pixels corresponding to the same class, thereby reducing the influence of SV. Besides, spectral similarity can be well maintained in local homogeneous regions. Second, the polynomial postnonlinear model is employed to represent observed pixels and explain nonlinear components. Regularized by a Fisher transformation operator and abundances’ spatial smoothness, data reconstruction errors in the original spectral space and the transformed space are weighed to derive the unmixing problem. Finally, this problem is solved by a dimensional division-based particle swarm optimization algorithm to produce accurate unmixing results. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real hyperspectral remote sensing data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches.