A Vertex-Directed Evolutionary Algorithm for Multiobjective Endmember Estimation

Abstract

Hyperspectral unmixing including endmember extration and abundance estimation has been investigated successively in recent years due to increasingly hyperspectral processing requirements. As one type of decision after solution paradigm, multiobjective endmember estimation method is able to obtain a set of Pareto optimal solutions, thus providing a wealth of information to determine the most representative endmembers. In addition, multiobjective optimization methods also have the characteristics of flexible modeling, excellent global convergence and commendable adaptability, etc. However, the evolutionary algorithms designed for this kind of method generally use little spatial-spectral information of the hyperspectral image. In this paper, we delve into the memetic strategy by exploiting the topological structure of hyperspectral data in the high-dimensional space to establish a vertex-directed multiobjective endmember estimation method, termed VD-MoEE. According to the frequently used linear mixture model, endmembers of hyperspectral images are generally distributed at the vertices of hyperspectral data manifold. Therefore, we design a vertex-directed local search operator to guide the search direction of the individuals in evolutionary algorithms. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real data sets demonstrated that the proposed VD-MOEE is able to achieve appealing performance in terms of the solution selecting and accuracy in comparison with several classic and state-of-the-art endmember estimation methods.