Mixing Support Detection-Based Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Sparse Hyperspectral Image Unmixing

Spectral unmixing is important in analyzing and processing hyperspectral images (HSIs). With the availability of large spectral signature libraries, the main task of spectral unmixing is to estimate corresponding proportions called abundances of pure spectral signatures called endmembers in mixed pixels. In this vein, only a few endmembers participate in the formation of mixed pixels in the scene and so we call them active endmembers. A plethora of sparse unmixing algorithms exploit spectral and spatial information in HSIs to enhance abundance estimation results. Many algorithms, however, treat the abundances corresponding to active and nonactive endmembers in the scene equivalently. In this article, we propose a framework named mixing support detection (MSD) for the spectral unmixing problem. The main idea is first to detect the active and nonactive endmembers at each iteration and then to treat the corresponding abundances differently. It follows that we only focus on the estimation of active abundances with the assumption of zero abundances corresponding to nonactive endmembers. It can be expected to reduce the computational cost, avoid the perturbations in nonactive abundances, and enhance the sparsity of the abundances. We embed the MSD framework in classic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) updates and obtain an ADMM-MSD algorithm. In particular, five ADMM-MSD-based unmixing algorithms are provided. The residual and objective convergence results of the proposed algorithm are given under certain assumptions. Both simulated and real-data experiments demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms.