Spectral Unmixing-Based Clustering of High-Spatial Resolution Hyperspectral Imagery

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised spectral unmixing-based clustering method for high-spatial resolution hyperspectral images (HSIs). In contrast to most clustering methods reported so far, which are applied on the spectral signature representations of the image pixels, the idea in the proposed method is to apply clustering on the abundance representations of the pixels. Specifically, the proposed method comprises two main processing stages namely: an unmixing stage (consisting of the endmember extraction and abundance estimation (AE) substages) and a clustering stage. In the former stage, suitable endmembers are selected first as the most representative pure pixels. Then, the spectral signature of each pixel is expressed as a linear combination of the endmembers' spectral signatures and the pixel itself is represented by the relative abundance vector, which is estimated via an efficient AE algorithm. The resulting abundance vectors associated with the HSI pixels are next fed to the clustering stage. Eventually, the pixels are grouped into clusters, in terms of their associated abundance vectors and not their spectral signatures. Experiments are performed on a synthetic HSI dataset as well as on three airborne HSI datasets of high-spatial resolution containing vegetation and urban areas. The experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art clustering techniques in terms of overall accuracy, average accuracy, and kappa coefficient.