A NOVEL APPROACH FOR ABUNDANCE ESTIMATION USING DISCONTINUITY
PRESERVING PRIOR
Jignesh R. Patel, Manjunath V. Joshi
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of
Information and Communication Technology,
Gandhinagar, India.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach to esti-
mate fractions (abundances) of materials (endmembers) in a
pixel by considering linear mixture model (LMM) and prior
knowledge of endmembers. We propose the use of inho-
mogeneous Gaussian Markov random field (IGMRF) that
captures the smoothness as well as preserves the discon-
tinuities among abundance values. We obtain the IGMRF
parameters for the proposed prior using the initial esti-
mate of abundances and both the abundances and IGMRF
parameters are refined by optimizing an objective func-
tion. A two-step iterative approach is proposed to obtain
the final estimates of both the abundance maps and their
prior parameters. In order to demonstrate the efficiency
of the proposed approach, we conduct experiments on the
synthetic hyperspectral images (HSIs) with different noise
levels as well as on the real HSIs and compare the result
with other state-of-the-art approaches.
Index Terms— Abundance estimation, Spectral un-
mixing, Fully constrained least squares (FCLS), Inhomo-
geneous Gaussian Markov random field (IGMRF).
1. INTRODUCTION
Hyperspectral images (HSIs) represent the collection of re-
flectance in hundreds of contiguous electromagnetic bands
of narrow bandwidth. The rich spectral details of HSI help
us in solving numerous problems such as classification of
the scene data, target detection, anomaly detections, etc.
The use of high spectral resolution image results in very
high discrimination capabilities. However, due to the con-
straints such as hardware, recording time, and the signal
to noise ratio (SNR), the HSIs have low spatial resolution
making the sensor reflectance to represent mixture of more
than one material. The process of decomposition of mixed
pixel (reflectance) into endmembers and their abundances
is called spectral unmixing. The concept of unmixing re-
quires three steps: (a) estimation of the number of endmem-
bers, (b) extraction of endmembers values, and (c) estima-
tion of their abundances [1]. In this work, we estimate the
abundance maps and assume that both the number of end-
members and their values (signatures) are available. Virtual
dimensionality (VD) [2] is a standard algorithm to identify
the number of endmembers, while Vertex component anal-
ysis (VCA) [3] extracts endmembers of the data by consid-
ering convexity of the data.
Jignesh S. Bhatt
Indian Institute of
Information Technology,
Vadodara, India.
In LMM, mixed data can be modeled for single input
vector of reflectance as,
r = M α + η, (1)
where, r ∈ Rl×1 denotes the spectral measurement, M ∈
Rl×p is the endmember matrix, α ∈ Rp×1 is called the
abundance vector. Here, l represents the number of spectral
bands, p is the number of endmembers and η corresponds
to independent and identically distributed (IID) white Gaus-
sian noise. We know that the α estimation requires sum-to-
one and no-negativity constraints. To this end, we use a
similar approach as given in FCLS [4] for the sum-to-one
constraint and the non-negativity constraint is taken care
while optimization of the objective function by considering
only the positive values while updating the abundances.
In general, abundance maps are spatially smooth, which
in practice is captured by Markov random field (MRF)
based prior. However, the use of homogeneous MRF does
not take into account the presence of discontinuities in the
abundance values. To this end, IGMRF prior can be used to
capture the smoothness and also preserve the discontinuity
[5]. However, the estimation of these parameters requires
the availability of true abundances which themselves have
to be estimated. In our work, we estimate them by us-
ing an initial abundance map and modify them iteratively
while refining the abundances. We used matched filter
(MF) [6] based approach for finding the initial estimate of
abundances maps which are then used in computing the
parameters for the prior. To get the refined final estimate of
abundances an objective function consisting of data fitting
and prior terms is formulated and is optimized using Adam
optimization [7]. Using an iterative approach, refined abun-
dance maps are used to reinitialize the IGMRF parameters
and then again the optimization is carried out in order to
obtain final abundances. Doing so, as a by product, we also
get the refined IGMRF parameters leading to their better
estimates.
2. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PROPOSED
APPROACH
The block diagram of the proposed approach is shown in
Fig. 1. We formulate this estimation problem in an energy
minimization framework. Given the hyperspectral data and
the endmembers, we estimate the abundances α by mini-
mizing the following energy function,
E(α) = ED (α) + EP (α), (2)
where, ED (α) represents the data fitting term measuring
the reconstruction error between the given and the recon-

HSI Endmembers
Initial abundance estimating
using MF
IGMRF
parameter initialization
Adam optimization
Estimated abundance maps
Fig. 1: Block diagram of the proposed approach.
structed reflectance. EP (α) represents the prior term that
constraints the smoothness and discontinuity of abundance
values in the spatial domain. Using the LMM given in
Equation (1), ED (α) can be easily obtained as,
X data and the prior terms. Using these terms given in Equa-
ED (α) = kr(x, y) − M α(x, y)k2 , (3)
(x,y)
where, r(x, y) represents the spectral measurement at (x, y)
pixel location and α(x, y) represents the abundance vector
consisting of abundance values for each endmember. We
define the prior term EP (α) using the modified IGMRF as
follows.
2.1. Modified IGMRF prior
The fact that the abundance maps have both smoothness
as well as discontinuities motivates us to use IGMRF as a
prior. While using IGMRF prior, one can write the prior
term EP (α) as the sum of squares of finite difference ap-
proximations to the first order derivatives of abundances at
each pixel location (x, y) for each of the endmember p [5]
as follows, X X
EP (α) = bx
(x,y,p) (α(x − 1, y, p) − α(x, y, p))
(x,y) p
+by(x,y,p) (α(x, y − 1, p) − α(x, y, p))2 ,
where, bx and by are the spatially adaptive IGMRF pa-
rameters in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively.
In [5], the authors used a maximum likelihood estimation
method to derive the IGMRF parameters as,
xIGM RF
1
b(x,y,p) =
max(4(αin (x − 1, y, p) − αin (x, y, p)))2 , 4)
1
yIGM RF
b(x,y,p) = ,
max(4(αin (x, y − 1, p) − αin (x, y, p)))2 , 4)
where, αin represents approximation to α which corre-
sponds to initial estimate in our work. Since the values of
abundances vary between 0 and 1, the IGMRF parameters
computed using Equation (5) also vary in the same range,
thus imposing the same penalty for differences, which is
illustrated in Fig. 2. Hence, the computed parameters us-
ing Equation (5) fail to preserve the discontinuity in the
abundances. We modify the computation of parameters as,
1 other state-of-the-art approaches. In order to check how our
bx(x,y,p) = 1 − , method performs on any initial estimate, we also performed
1 + e−5×|(αin (x−1,y,p)−αin (x,y,p))|
(6)
1
by(x,y,p) = 1 − . tained using the initial estimate of abundances obtained by
1 + e−5×|(αin (x,y−1,p)−αin (x,y,p))|
In Fig. 2, we also show the variation of bx (modified param-
eter) w.r.t variation in dx = |αin (x−1, y, p)−αin (x, y, p)|.
As seen in Fig. 2, the proposed parameter now has a larger
penalty for smaller differences (smooth region) and smaller
penalty for higher differences (edges).
1
0.8
bxIGM RF \bx .
0.6
0.4
bxIGM RF
0.2
bx
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
dx
Fig. 2: Variation of IGMRF parameter bxIGM RF and the
proposed parameter bx with the difference dx between two
neighboring abundances.
2.2. Estimation of final abundance maps
As already stated earlier, we estimate the abundance maps
by using energy minimization framework which requires
tion (3) and Equation (4), the final energy function to be
minimized is Xgiven by,
E(α) = kr(x, y) − M α(x, y)k2 +
(x,y)
X X
bx
(x,y,p) (α(x − 1, y, p) − α(x, y, p))
2 (7)
(x,y) p
+ by(x,y,p) (α(x, y − 1, p) − α(x, y, p))2 .
The function given in Equation (7) is convex and hence can
be easily minimized by using gradient-descent optimization
method. To carry out the optimization, We use Adam opti-
mizer [7] which computes the adaptive learning rates from
the estimates of first and second moments of the gradients
of energy function w.r.t abundances. Once the abundances
are estimated, we iterate the following two steps until con-
2
vergence in order to get the final abundance maps
(4) Step 1: Compute bx and by parameters using Equation
(6) by keeping α fixed.
Step 2: Optimize Equation (7) for α by keeping the bx
and by fixed.
3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
We first conduct the experiment on synthetic HSIs gener-
, ated using three spectral signatures of the U.S. Geological
(5) Survey (USGS) digital spectral library [8]. We next show
the experiments on the two real data sets consisting of
Urban data captured by Hyper-spectral Digital Imagery
Collection Experiment (HYDIC) [9] and Cuprite data col-
lected by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrom-
eter (AVIRIS) [10] used in the hyperspectral unmixing
[11]. The IGMRF parameters were initialized with those
computed using the abundances estimated from the MF
based approach, and with this our algorithm converges in
four iterations. We compare our proposed approach with
the experiments by initializing the IGMRF parameters ob-
FCLS [4] and Maxent [12] approaches. In this case, our
algorithm converged in less than four iterations. The per-
formance comparison using quantitative method was done
by using the root mean squared error (RMSE) [13] and
the spectral angle mapper (SAM) [14] as the quantitative
 Ammonioalunite Brucite Andradite Table 1: Quantitative comparison on synthetic data
Initial SNR
Measure Algorithm
estimate -5dB 0dB 5dB 10dB 20dB
Maxent [12] - 0.0900 0.0562 0.0368 0.0245 0.0129
FCLS [4] - 0.1002 0.0600 0.0344 0.0194 0.0068
DGAE [18] - 0.3383 0.2473 0.1198 0.0370 0.0072
RMSE [13]
MF 0.0971 0.0528 0.0284 0.0160 0.0062
Proposed Maxent 0.0874 0.0498 0.0280 0.0163 0.0065
(a) Ground truth FCLS 0.0907 0.0508 0.0277 0.0157 0.0063
Maxent [12] - 0.1678 0.1044 0.0681 0.0443 0.0231
FCLS [4] - 0.1890 0.1125 0.0652 0.0370 0.0127
DGAE [18] - 0.5431 0.4185 0.2236 0.0647 0.0134
SAM [14]
MF 0.1810 0.0981 0.0539 0.0301 0.0113
Proposed Maxent 0.1626 0.0924 0.0530 0.0308 0.0117
FCLS 0.1698 0.0947 0.0523 0.0298 0.0115

Table 2: Quantitative comparison on real data

(b) FCLS [4]
(c) Proposed
Fig. 3: Abundance maps for synthetically generated data
for 5 dB SNR.
measures. The expression for RMSE and SAM are given
by the following
v
equations,
u
u1 X p
αT α
ci )2 , SAM = cos−1
(αi − α
b
RM SE = t . (8)
p i=1 kαkkb
αk
Here, αi and α̂i represent the abundance values of true and
estimated abundances where as α and α̂ correspond to the
respective vectors.
3.1. Experiments on synthetic data
We generate the synthetic HSIs by using the linear mixing
of spectral signature recorded using 224 bands of the USGS
library [15]. Here, the size of each synthetic HSI is 75 × 75
pixels which consist of three materials: namely, Ammo-
nioalunite NMNH145596, Brucite HS247.3B, and Andra-
dite WS487. The experiments are performed at different
SNR levels, and the quantitative comparison is shown in
Table 1. Here, in addition to Maxent [12] and FCLS [4], the
recently proposed methods cSUNSAl [16], SPU [17], and
DGAE [18] are also considered for comparison. However,
the performance of the methods cSUNSAl [16] and SPU
[17] is similar to FCLS [4] and hence we have not included
in these in the Table 1. The use of MF based approach for
initial abundance estimation performs better than the others
except for SNR = -5dB where Maxent [12] performs better.
However in this case, our approach with Maxent initializa-
tion performs better when compared to Maxent itself. The
results also show that initialization with Maxent [12] and
FCLS [4] perform better. The estimated abundance maps
using the proposed as well as the FCLS methods are shown
in Fig. 3 for 5 dB SNR. Looking at Fig. 3, we observe
that the homogeneous region in abundance maps estimated
using the proposed approach appear smoother when com-
pared to the FCLS and also our method better preserves the
discontinuities among the abundances as evident at the bor-
ders of the abundance squares.
3.2. Experiments on real data
We applied our algorithm on Urban hyperspectral images
of HYDIC [9] of size 307 × 307 pixels having 210 bands
with 4 endmembers (Asphalt, Grass, Tree, and Roof). Here,
Measure Algorithm Initial estimate Urban Data [9] Curprite Data [10]
Maxent [12] - 0.0687 0.0375
FCLS [4] - 0.0682 0.0369
cSUNSAL [16] - 0.0677 0.0438
SPU [17] - 0.0682 0.0369
DRE
DGAE [18] - 0.0699 0.0374
MF 0.0411 0.0211
Proposed Maxent 0.0522 0.0209
FCLS 0.0402 0.0209
the noisy bands representing the water adsorptions were re-
moved and the experiment was performed on 162 bands
only. We also conducted experiment on 188 bands of HSI
data acquired by AVIRIS sensor [10] and for this exper-
iment, we used sub-images of the size 250 × 190 pixels
having 224 bands with 12 endmembers after removing the
noisy bands. Since the true abundances are not available
here, we used the data reconstruction error (DRE) mea-
sured in terms of RMSE at each pixel between the original
and the reconstructed HSI as the quantitative measure. As
given in Table 2, the results for the proposed approach are
better than other state-of-the-art methods. Note that, in the
case of synthetic data, where the noise is also simulated,
our approach with MF based initialization is slightly infe-
rior when compared to Maxent at very low SNR (-5dB).
However, for real data, our approach performed better even
when initialized with MF method. The estimated abun-
dance maps for Urban data are shown in the Fig. 4, where
we observe that the abundance maps estimated using the
proposed approach are closer to the ground truth when
compared to the FCLS approach. Before we conclude, we
would like to mention few points regarding computational
complexity. Though, the proposed approach is iterative,
the computation time is not significantly high since our
algorithm converged in very few iterations. Note that, the
other state-of-the-art approaches [4, 12, 16, 17, 18] are
not iterative and hence are slightly better in terms of time
complexity. However, our method considers the spatial
correlation of abundances at every location in the form of
IGMRF parameters which is not done in other approaches.
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach to esti-
mate abundance maps by energy minimization framework.
A new discontinuity preserving prior is proposed by mod-
ifying the expression for IGMRF parameters. A two-step
iterative algorithm is used to refine the abundance maps
as well as the parameters. The experiments conducted on
synthetic and the real HSIs show that our method performs
better when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches
even at very low SNR.
 Asphalt Grass Tree Roof
(a) Ground truth
(b) FCLS [4]
(c) Proposed
Fig. 4: Abundance maps for URBAN hyperspectral data of
[9].
5. REFERENCES
[1] J. M. Bioucas-Dias, A. Plaza, N. Dobigeon, M. Par-
ente, Q. Du, P. Gader, and J. Chanussot, “Hyper-
spectral unmixing overview: Geometrical, statistical,
and sparse regression-based approaches,” IEEE Jour-
nal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations
and Remote Sensing, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 354–379, April
2012.
[2] Chein-I Chang and Qian Du, “Estimation of num-
ber of spectrally distinct signal sources in hyperspec-
tral imagery,” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and
Remote Sensing, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 608–619, March
2004.
[3] J. M. P. Nascimento and J. M. B. Dias, “Vertex com-
ponent analysis: a fast algorithm to unmix hyperspec-
tral data,” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Re-
mote Sensing, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 898–910, April 2005.
[4] D. C. Heinz and Chein-I-Chang, “Fully constrained
least squares linear spectral mixture analysis method
for material quantification in hyperspectral imagery,”
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sens-
ing, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 529–545, Mar 2001.
[5] A. Jalobeanu, L. Blanc-Feraud, and J. Zerubia, “An
adaptive gaussian model for satellite image deblur-
ring,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol.
13, no. 4, pp. 613–621, April 2004.
[6] J. W. Boardman and F. A. Kruse, “Analysis of imaging
spectrometer data using n -dimensional geometry and
a mixture-tuned matched filtering approach,” IEEE
Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol.
49, no. 11, pp. 4138–4152, Nov 2011.
[7] Diederik Kingma and Jimmy Ba, “Adam: A
method for stochastic optimization,” arXiv preprint
arXiv:1412.6980, 2014.
[8] Roger N Clark, Gregg A Swayze, Richard Wise,
K Eric Livo, T Hoefen, Raymond F Kokaly, and
Stephen J Sutley, “Usgs digital spectral library
splib06a,” US geological survey, digital data series,
vol. 231, 2007.
[9] S. J. Ford, J. C. McGlone, S. D. Cochran, J. A. Shufelt,
W. A. Harvey, and D. M. McKeown, “Analysis of hy-
dice data for information fusion in cartographic fea-
ture extraction,” in Geoscience and Remote Sens-
ing Symposium Proceedings, 1998. IGARSS ’98. 1998
IEEE International, Jul 1998, vol. 5, pp. 2702–2706
vol.5.
[10] Gregg Vane, Robert O Green, Thomas G Chrien,
Harry T Enmark, Earl G Hansen, and Wallace M
Porter, “The airborne visible/infrared imaging spec-
trometer (aviris),” Remote sensing of environment,
vol. 44, no. 2-3, pp. 127–143, 1993.
[11] F. Zhu, Y. Wang, B. Fan, S. Xiang, G. Meng, and
C. Pan, “Spectral unmixing via data-guided sparsity,”
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 23, no.
12, pp. 5412–5427, Dec 2014.
[12] L. Miao, H. Qi, and H. Szu, “A maximum entropy ap-
proach to unsupervised mixed-pixel decomposition,”
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 16, no.
4, pp. 1008–1021, April 2007.
[13] Z. Wang and A. C. Bovik, “Mean squared error: Love
it or leave it? a new look at signal fidelity measures,”
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 26, no. 1, pp.
98–117, Jan 2009.
[14] Roberta H Yuhas, Alexander FH Goetz, and Joe W
Boardman, “Discrimination among semi-arid land-
scape endmembers using the spectral angle mapper
(sam) algorithm,” 1992.
[15] RN Clark, GA Swayze, A Gallagher, T King, and
W Calvin, “The us geological survey digital spec-
tral library: Version 1: 0.2 to 3.0 µm. open file report
93-592,” US Geological Survey, 1993.
[16] J. M. Bioucas-Dias and M. A. T. Figueiredo, “Alter-
nating direction algorithms for constrained sparse re-
gression: Application to hyperspectral unmixing,” in
2010 2nd Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Sig-
nal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing, June
2010, pp. 1–4.
[17] R. Heylen, D. Burazerovic, and P. Scheunders, “Fully
constrained least squares spectral unmixing by sim-
plex projection,” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience
and Remote Sensing, vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 4112–4122,
Nov 2011.
[18] H. Pu, W. Xia, B. Wang, and G. M. Jiang, “A fully
constrained linear spectral unmixing algorithm based
on distance geometry,” IEEE Transactions on Geo-
science and Remote Sensing, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 1157–
1176, Feb 2014.