On-the-fly spectral unmixing based on Kalman filtering

This work introduces an on-the-fly (i.e., online) linear spectral unmixing method which is able to sequentially analyze spectral data acquired on a spectrum-by-spectrum basis. After deriving a sequential counterpart of the conventional linear mixing model, the proposed approach recasts the linear unmixing problem into a linear state-space estimation framework. Under Gaussian noise and state models, the estimation of the pure spectra can be efficiently conducted by resorting to Kalman filtering. Interestingly, it is shown that this Kalman filter can operate in a lower-dimensional subspace to lighten the computational burden of the overall unmixing procedure. Experimental results obtained on synthetic and real Raman data sets show that this Kalman filter-based method offers a convenient trade-off between unmixing accuracy and computational efficiency, which is crucial for operating in an on-the-fly setting. The proposed method constitutes a valuable building block for benefiting from acquisition and processing frameworks recently proposed in the microscopy literature, which are motivated by practical issues such as reducing acquisition time and avoiding potential damages being inflicted to photosensitive samples. The code associated with the numerical illustrations reported in this paper is freely available online at https://github.com/HKouakou/KF-OSU.