Robust multilayer matrix factorization for blind hyperspectral image unmixing

Hyperspectral image unmixing estimates a collection of constituent materials (called endmembers) and their corresponding proportions (called abundances), which is a critical preprocessing step in many remote sensing applications. In this paper, we propose a novel robust multilayer matrix factorization (RMLMF) approach for hyperspectral image unmixing. Firstly, instead of sampling all observed pixels, the endmembers are modeled as a linear combination of candidate endmembers to reduce the redundant spectra and alleviate heavy computational cost. Secondly, to explore the hidden information, the shallow decomposition is extended into multilayer structure. Furthermore, considering that hyperspectral images (HSIs) still suffer from a variety of noises, <i>L</i>_2,1-norm is employed to measure the reconstruction error of the multilayer structure. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed RMLMF over many state-of-the-art algorithms.