Subspace Structure Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing is a crucial task for hyperspectral images (HSIs) processing, which estimates the proportions of constituent materials of a mixed pixel. Usually, the mixed pixels can be approximated using a linear mixing model. Since each material only occurs in a few pixels in real HSI, sparse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), and its extensions are widely used as solutions. Some recent works assume that materials are distributed in certain structures, which can be added as constraints to sparse NMF model. However, they only consider the spatial distribution within a local neighborhood and define the distribution structure manually, while ignoring the real distribution of materials that is diverse in different images. In this article, we propose a new unmixing method that learns a subspace structure from the original image and incorporate it into the sparse NMF framework to promote unmixing performance. Based on the self-representation property of data points lying in the same subspace, the learned subspace structure can indicate the global similar graph of pixels that represents the real distribution of materials. Then the similar graph is used as a robust global spatial prior which is expected to be maintained in the decomposed abundance matrix. The experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world HSI datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.