DMAE-HU: A novel deep multitasking autoencoder for hybrid hyperspectral unmixing in remote sensing

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is crucial for extracting material information from hyperspectral images (HSI) obtained through remote sensing. Although linear unmixing methods are widely used due to their simplicity, they only address linear mixing effects. Nonlinear mixing models, while more complex, often focus solely on the nonlinear aspects affecting individual pixels. However, in practice, light reflected from materials within a pixel experiences linear and nonlinear interactions, necessitating a hybrid mixing model (HMM) that leverages spatial and spectral information. This work proposes a novel deep learning-based autoencoder (AE) with dual-stream decoders to enhance spectral unmixing. Our approach employs multitask learning (MTL) to process spatial and spectral information concurrently. Specifically, one decoder stream performs linear unmixing from HSI patches, while the other stream utilizes fully connected layers to capture and model the nonlinear interactions within the data. By integrating linear and nonlinear information, our method improves the accuracy of unmixing the mixed spectrum. We validate the effectiveness of our architecture on three real-world HSI datasets and compare its performance against various baseline methods. Experimental results consistently demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, as evidenced by superior spectral angle distance (SAD) and mean squared error (MSE) metrics.