Sparse Distributed Multitemporal Hyperspectral Unmixing

Blind hyperspectral unmixing jointly estimates spectral signatures and abundances in hyperspectral images (HSIs). Hyperspectral unmixing is a powerful tool for analyzing hyperspectral data. However, the usual huge size of HSIs may raise difficulties for classical unmixing algorithms, namely, due to limitations of the hardware used. Therefore, some researchers have considered distributed algorithms. In this paper, we develop a distributed hyperspectral unmixing algorithm that uses the alternating direction method of multipliers and ℓ
₁
sparse regularization. The hyperspectral unmixing problem is split into a number of smaller subproblems that are individually solved, and then the solutions are combined. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is that each subproblem does not need to have access to the whole HSI. The algorithm may also be applied to multitemporal HSIs with due adaptations accounting for variability that often appears in multitemporal images. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using both simulated data and real HSIs.