Nonnegative sparse autoencoder for robust endmember extraction from remotely sensed hyperspectral images

Endmember extraction is a fundamental task in spectral unmixing of remotely sensed hyperspectral images. In this work, we develop a new robust algorithm for endmember extraction which is based on a nonnegative sparse autoencoder. The proposed approach is based on two main steps. First, it uses an automatic sampler approach with local outlier factor and affinity propagation to intelligently gather a set of training samples. Then, a set of endmember signatures are extracted from the selected training samples by the nonnegative sparse autoencoder. Taking advantage from both automatic sampling and nonnegative sparse autoencoding, the proposed method can tackle problems with outliers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by using simulated data. In our comparison with other state-of-the-art endmember extraction methods, the proposed approach demonstrates highly competitive performance.