Essential Spectral Pixels for Multivariate Curve Resolution of Chemical Images

We propose a methodology to select essential spectral pixels (ESPs) of chemical images. These pixels are on the outer envelope of the principal component scores of the data and can be identified by convex-hull computation. As ESPs carry all the linearly mixed spectral information, large hyperspectral images can be dramatically reduced before multivariate curve resolution (MCR) analysis. We investigated chemical images of different spectroscopies, sizes, and complexities and show that the analysis of full data sets of hundreds of thousands of spectral pixels only require a few tenths of them.