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.
Authors
- Ran Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9023-3825)
- Junfeng Pu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5322-2721)
- Yanling Miao
- Dawei Liu
- Qi Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7028-4956)
- Yanru Chen
Institutions
- Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN)
- China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Remote Sensing
- Published
- 2026-04-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18081250
- Primary Topic
- Remote-Sensing Image Classification
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00