Abundance guided endmember selection: An algorithm for unmixing hyperspectral data

Linear unmixing is a blind source separation problem that decomposes a hyperspectral image into the spectra of the material constituents of the scene and the abundance maps of those materials across that scene. A novel method for determining the material spectra from within the scene, AGES, is proposed based on the positional information contained within abundances generated by additivity-constrained inversion. This new approach is compared on both simulated and real data sets to the well established N-FINDR algorithm, comparing favorably in terms of computational complexity with the existing algorithm without significantly sacrificing accuracy. In addition, the algorithm has some desirable properties inherent in such an approach.