Low-Rank Subspace Unmixing of Remotely Sensed Hyperspectral Image

Spectral unmixing is an important technique for hyperspectral image application, which aims to estimate the pure spectral signatures in each mixed pixel and their corresponding fractional abundances. However, due to the influence of factors such as illumination, topography change and atmosphere, spectral variability is inevitable, which will lead to inaccurate unmixing results. Traditional unmixing methods fail to handle this problem, especially the complex spectral variability in the image. To address this limitation, a new technique called low-rank subspace unmixing (LRSU) was established, which aims to jointly estimate a subspace projection and abundance maps. For the proposed LRSU approach, the original data is projected into a low-rank subspace to deal with various spectral variabilities in spectral unmixing. Meanwhile, the spectral-spatial weighted sparse regularization term is introduced to upgrade the sparsity of the solution and capture the piecewise smooth structure of the data. The experimental results, conducted using synthetic data sets, quantitatively indicate that the proposed LRSU strategy produces better results than other advanced spectral unmixing methods.