Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Based on Smoothing and Sparse Constraints for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is a technique for estimating a set of pure source signals (end members) and their proportions (abundances) from each pixel of the hyperspectral image. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) can decompose the observation matrix into the product of two non-negative matrices simultaneously and can be used in HU. Unfortunately, a limitation of many traditional NMF-based methods, i.e., the non-convexity of the objective function, may lead to a sub-optimal solution. Thus, we put forward a new unmixing method based on NMF under smoothing and sparse constraints to obtain a better solution. First, considering the sparseness of the abundance matrix, a weight sparse regularization is introduced into the NMF model to ensure the sparseness of the abundance matrix. Second, according to the similarity prior of the same feature in the adjacent pixels, a Total Variation regularization is further added to the NMF model to improve the smoothness of the abundance map. Finally, the signatures of each end member are modified smoothly in spectral space. Moreover, it is noticed that discontinuities may emerge due to the removal of noisy bands. Therefore, the spectral data are piecewise smooth in spectral space. Then, in this paper, a piecewise smoothness constraint is further applied to each column of the end-member matrix. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method based on two different datasets, including a synthetic dataset and the real-life Cuprite dataset, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art HU methods. In the Cuprite hyperspectral dataset, the proposed method’s Spectral Angle Distance is 0.1694, compared to the TV-RSNMF method’s 0.1703, L(1/2)NMF method’s 0.1925, and VCA-FCLS method’s 0.1872.