Minimum Volume Simplex Analysis: A Fast Algorithm to Unmix Hyperspectral Data

This paper presents a new method of minimum volume class for hyperspectral unmixing, termed minimum volume simplex analysis (MVSA). The underlying mixing model is linear; i.e., the mixed hyperspectral vectors are modeled by a linear mixture of the endmember signatures weighted by the correspondent abundance fractions. MVSA approaches hyperspectral unmixing by fitting a minimum volume simplex to the hyperspectral data, constraining the abundance fractions to belong to the probability simplex. The resulting optimization problem is solved by implementing a sequence of quadratically constrained subproblems. In a final step, the hard constraint on the abundance fractions is replaced with a hinge type loss function to account for outliers and noise. We illustrate the state-of-the-art performance of the MVSA algorithm in unmixing simulated data sets. We are mainly concerned with the realistic scenario in which the pure pixel assumption (i.e., there exists at least one pure pixel per endmember) is not fulfilled. In these conditions, the MVSA yields much better performance than the pure pixel based algorithms.