Advances in hyperspectral and multispectral image fusion and spectral unmixing

Abstract

In this work, we jointly process high spectral and high geometric resolution images and exploit their synergies to (a) generate a fused image of high spectral and geometric resolution; and (b) improve (linear) spectral unmixing of hyperspectral endmembers at subpixel level w.r.t. the pixel size of the hyperspectral image. We assume that the two images are radiometrically corrected and geometrically co-registered. The scientific contributions of this work are (a) a simultaneous approach to image fusion and hyperspectral unmixing, (b) enforcing several physically plausible constraints during unmixing that are all well-known, but typically not used in combination, and (c) the use of efficient, state-of-the-art mathematical optimization tools to implement the processing. The results of our joint fusion and unmixing has the potential to enable more accurate and detailed semantic interpretation of objects and their properties in hyperspectral and multispectral images, with applications in environmental mapping, monitoring and change detection. In our experiments, the proposed method always improves the fusion compared to competing methods, reducing RMSE between 4% and 53%.