358 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATION S AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 5, NO. 2, A
PRIL 2012
Fig. 6. Illustration of the concept o f simplex o f minimum volume containin g the data for three data sets. The endme mbers in the left hand side and in the middle
are identifiable by fitting a simplex of minimum volume to the data, whereas this is not applicable to the righ t hand side data set. The former data set correspond
to a highly mix ed scenario.
II. LINEAR MIXTURE MODEL
If the mul tip le scattering among distinct endm emb e rs is neg-
ligible and the surface is partitioned according to the fractional
abundances, as illustrated in Fig. 2, then the spectrum of each
pixel is well approximated by a linear mixture o f endmember
spectra weighted by the corresponding fractional abundances
[1], [3], [29], [ 39]. In this case, the spectral measurement
1
at
channel
( is the total number o f channels)
from a given pixel, den oted by
,isgivenbythelinear mixing
model (LMM)
(1)
where
denotes the spectral measurement of endmember
at the spectral band, denotes th e frac-
tional abu ndan ce of endmember
, denotes an additive per-
turbation (e.g., noise and modeling er rors), and
denotes the
number o f endmembers. At a giv en pixel, the fractional abun-
dance
, as the name suggests, represents the fractio nal area
occupied by the
th endmem ber. Therefore, the fractional abun-
dances are subject to the following constraints:
(2)
i.e., the fractional abundance vector
(the notation indicates vector transposed) is in the standard
-simplex (or unit -simplex). In HU jargon, the
nonnegativity and the sum-to-o ne constraints are termed a bun -
dance nonnegativity constraint (ANC) and abunda nce sum con-
straint (A SC), respectively. Researchers may sometimes expect
that the abundance fractions su m to less than one since an algo -
rithm m ay not be able to account for every m aterial in a pixel;
it is not clear whether it is better to relax the constraint or to
simply consider that part of the modeling e rror.
Let
denote a -dimensional column vector, and
denote the spectral signatu re of the
th endmember. Expression (1) can then be written as
(3)
1
Although the typ e of spe ctral quantity (radiance, reflectance, etc.) is impor-
tant when processing data, specification is not necessary to derive the math e-
matical approaches.
where is the mixing matrix containing
the signatures of the endmembers present in the covered area,
and
. Assuming that the columns of are
affinely independent, i.e.,
are linearly independent, then the set
i.e., the convex hull of the columns of ,isa -simplex
in
. Fig. 5 illustrates a 2-simplex for a hypothetical mixing
matrix
containing three endmembers. The points in green de-
note spectral vectors, whereas the points in red are vertices of
the simplex and corresp ond t o the e nd members. Note that the
inference of the mixing matrix
is equivalent to identifying
the vertices of the simplex
. This geometrical point of view,
exploited by many unmixing algorithms, will be fu rt her devel-
oped in Section IV-B.
Since m any algorithms adopt either a geometrical or a sta-
tistical framework [34], [36], they are a focus of this paper. To
motivate these two dir ectio ns, let us consid er the th ree d ata sets
shown in Fig. 6 generated under the linear model given in (3)
where the noise is assumed to be negligible. The spectral v ec-
tors generated according to (3) are in a simplex whose vertices
correspond to the endmembers. The l eft hand side data set con-
tains pure pixels, i.e, for any of the
endmembers th ere is at
least one pixel containing only the correspondent material; the
data set in the middle does not contain pure pixels but contains
at least
spectral vectors on each facet. In both data sets
(left and middle), the endm em bers may by inferred by fitting a
minimum volume (MV) simplex to the data; this rather simple
and yet powerful idea, introduced by Craig in his seminal work
[81], underlies several geometrical based unmixing algorithms.
A sim ilar idea was introduced in 1989 by Perczel in the area of
Chemometrics et al. [82].
The MV simplex show n in the right hand side example of
Fig. 6 is smaller than the true one. T his s ituation corresponds
to a highly mixed data set where there are no spectral vectors
near the facets. For these classes of problems, w e usually re-
sort to the statistical framework in which the estimation of the
mixing matrix and of the fractio nal abundances are formulated
as a statistical inference problem by adop tin g suitable proba-
bility models for the variables and p arameters involved, namely
for the fractional abundances and for the mixing matri x.