Unsupervised Hyperspectral Unmixing Based on Multi-Faceted Graph Representation and Curriculum Learning

Hyperspectral unmixing aims to estimate endmember spectra and their corresponding abundance fractions at the subpixel scale, which is a critical preprocessing step for quantitative analysis of hyperspectral remote sensing imagery. While deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable progress, three fundamental challenges remain: (i) reliance on a single shared spatial prior that cannot decouple the heterogeneous spatial patterns of different land covers; (ii) the lack of synergy in jointly optimizing endmember extraction and abundance estimation; (iii) the poor robustness of unsupervised training to complex mixtures, noise, and class imbalance. To address these issues, we propose a novel unsupervised unmixing framework that integrates adaptive orthogonal multi-faceted graph representation with curriculum learning. Specifically, we design an Adaptive Orthogonal Multi-Faceted Graph Generator (AOMFG) to learn a set of independent orthogonal graph structures, achieving spatially informed decoupling of land cover patterns. Then, a dual-branch collaborative optimization network is constructed: a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) branch that incorporates the learned spatial topological priors for abundance estimation, and a 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1DCNN) branch that employs a query-attention mechanism to adaptively aggregate pure spectral features for endmember extraction. Finally, we introduce a three-stage curriculum learning strategy that progressively fine-tunes the model, which significantly enhances its performance. Extensive experiments on three widely used real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both endmember extraction and abundance estimation accuracy. Comprehensive ablation studies, parameter sensitivity analysis, and noise robustness tests further validate the effectiveness of each core component.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-04-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18081250
Primary Topic
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
Type
article
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article

Unsupervised Hyperspectral Unmixing Based on Multi-Faceted Graph Representation and Curriculum Learning

Ran Liu, Junfeng Pu, Yanling Miao, Dawei Liu et al.
Remote Sensing
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
article

Unsupervised Hyperspectral Unmixing Based on Multi-Faceted Graph Representation and Curriculum Learning

Ran Liu, Junfeng Pu, Yanling Miao, Dawei Liu, Qi Wang, Yanru Chen
article en

Abstract

Hyperspectral unmixing aims to estimate endmember spectra and their corresponding abundance fractions at the subpixel scale, which is a critical preprocessing step for quantitative analysis of hyperspectral remote sensing imagery. While deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable progress, three fundamental challenges remain: (i) reliance on a single shared spatial prior that cannot decouple the heterogeneous spatial patterns of different land covers; (ii) the lack of synergy in jointly optimizing endmember extraction and abundance estimation; (iii) the poor robustness of unsupervised training to complex mixtures, noise, and class imbalance. To address these issues, we propose a novel unsupervised unmixing framework that integrates adaptive orthogonal multi-faceted graph representation with curriculum learning. Specifically, we design an Adaptive Orthogonal Multi-Faceted Graph Generator (AOMFG) to learn a set of independent orthogonal graph structures, achieving spatially informed decoupling of land cover patterns. Then, a dual-branch collaborative optimization network is constructed: a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) branch that incorporates the learned spatial topological priors for abundance estimation, and a 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1DCNN) branch that employs a query-attention mechanism to adaptively aggregate pure spectral features for endmember extraction. Finally, we introduce a three-stage curriculum learning strategy that progressively fine-tunes the model, which significantly enhances its performance. Extensive experiments on three widely used real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both endmember extraction and abundance estimation accuracy. Comprehensive ablation studies, parameter sensitivity analysis, and noise robustness tests further validate the effectiveness of each core component.

Remote SensingVol. 18(8)
Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN), China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 16%
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
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