Informed NMF-Based Unmixing Method Addressing Spectral Variability for Marine Mucilage Mapping using Hyperspectral Prisma Data

Disasters in marine ecosystems, such as the outbreak of mucilage in the inland Sea of Marmara in the spring of 2021, raise serious environmental, economic and public health concerns. Recently, methods based on fully unsupervised unmixing and dealing with spectral variability have made it possible to analyze marine mucilage, quantify its abundance and thus to map this harmful phenomenon. This work proposes to use an informed (or semi-supervised) unmixing technique, which is based on nonnegative matrix factorization and dealing with spectral variability, using a field-measured spectrum of high-density (or accumulated) mucilage, in order to detect and map, in particular, this marine material. The used technique is evaluated on real hyperspectral PRISMA data, and compared with other unmixing-based techniques.