Autoencoder-Based Hyperspectral Unmixing with Simultaneous Number-of-Endmembers Estimation

Hyperspectral unmixing plays a fundamental role in mining meaningful information from hyperspectral data. It promotes advancements in various scientific, environmental, and industrial applications by extracting meaningful information from hyperspectral data. However, it is still hindered by several challenges, including accurately identifying the number of endmembers in a hyperspectral image, extracting the endmembers, and estimating their abundance fractions. This research addresses these challenges by employing a convolutional-neural-network-based autoencoder that leverages both the spatial and spectral information present in the hyperspectral image. Additionally, a self-learning module utilizing a fuzzy clustering algorithm is designed to determine the number of endmembers. A novel approach is also introduced that estimates the abundances of the endmembers from the autoencoder and the clustering output. Real datasets and relevant performance metrics were used to validate and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms related methods, achieving improvements of 47% in Spectral Angle Distance (SAD) and 42% in root-mean-square error (RMSE).