Title: Inertia-Constrained Pixel-by-Pixel Nonnegative Matrix Factorisation: a Hyperspectral Unmixing Method Dealing with Intra-class Variability,
Abstract: Blind source separation is a common processing tool to analyse the
constitution of pixels of hyperspectral images. Such methods usually suppose
that pure pixel spectra (endmembers) are the same in all the image for each
class of materials. In the framework of remote sensing, such an assumption is
no more valid in the presence of intra-class variabilities due to illumination
conditions, weathering, slight variations of the pure materials, etc... In this
paper, we first describe the results of investigations highlighting intra-class
variability measured in real images. Considering these results, a new
formulation of the linear mixing model is presented leading to two new methods.
Unconstrained Pixel-by-pixel NMF (UP-NMF) is a new blind source separation
method based on the assumption of a linear mixing model, which can deal with
intra-class variability. To overcome UP-NMF limitations an extended method is
proposed, named Inertia-constrained Pixel-by-pixel NMF (IP-NMF). For each
sensed spectrum, these extended versions of NMF extract a corresponding set of
source spectra. A constraint is set to limit the spreading of each source's
estimates in IP-NMF. The methods are tested on a semi-synthetic data set built
with spectra extracted from a real hyperspectral image and then numerically
mixed. We thus demonstrate the interest of our methods for realistic source
variabilities. Finally, IP-NMF is tested on a real data set and it is shown to
yield better performance than state of the art methods.