Spatial-Aware Hyperspectral Nonlinear Unmixing Autoencoder With Endmember Number Estimation

In this article, we develop a novel fully unsupervised autoencoder-based scheme for nonlinear hyperspectral pixel unmixing. A unique approach is derived where high noise and unresponsive pixels are accounted for, by a unique averaging approach based on spatially aware filters built using radial basis function (RBF) kernels. A novel technique is implemented via calculating rank-equivalent kernel covariance matrices in order to estimate the unknown number of endmembers contributing to the data. Utilization of spatial information is done via RBF-based weighted averaging, which is then followed by endmember estimation via K-means clustering. The RBF distances from the cluster centers are determined to measure the position of the mixed pixels in relation to the centers, which is utilized as a preliminary estimation of the abundances. The proposed framework is robust in the presence of unresponsive pixels, while highly versatile working with different nonlinear unmixing models. Extensive numerical tests establish the superiority of the novel approach with respect to state-of-the-art methods.