A Multistrategy Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Method for Hyperspectral Endmember Extraction

Hyperspectral endmember extraction (HEE) is an essential part of remote-sensing image processing. There have been recent attempts to model the HEE as a multiobjective optimization problem and apply multiobjective evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem. However, because of the large HEE search space, it is difficult for the current algorithms to achieve exploration–exploitation balance, and they easily stall prematurely. To address these issues, this article proposes a multistrategy evolutionary multiobjective method based on roulette wheel selection and the genetic algorithm (RWS-GA) for endmember extraction. This method designs two parallel algorithms corresponding to global exploration and local exploitation. In the RWS-GA, an improved NSGA-II method, adopting a novel method to sort individuals on the same front instead of the crowding distance, is proposed to divide individuals into superior and inferior subpopulations. Thereafter, different modified population update strategies are utilized for subpopulations based on characteristics. Pixels that appear more frequently in the population are considered to perform better to have a higher probability of forming an endmember set with other pixels. In addition, excellent individuals often exhibit a higher probability of including endmembers compared with inferior individuals. Considering the abovementioned opinions, roulette wheel selection is performed on the inferior subpopulation for global search. Meanwhile, the superior subpopulation is responsible for local search based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Furthermore, an offspring complement mechanism (OCM) is presented to prevent duplicate individuals from appearing in historical archives. Numerous comparative experiments show that the proposed method is superior to other endmember extraction methods in three real-world datasets.