A PYRAMID-BASED BLOCK OF SKEWERS FOR PIXEL PURITY INDEX FOR ENDMEMBER EXTRACTION IN HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGERY

Pixel Purity Index (PPI) has been widely used for endmember extraction. Recently, an approach using blocks of skewers was proposed by Theiler et al., called blocks of skewers (BOS) method, to improve computation of the PPI. It utilizes a block of skewers to reduce number of calculations of dot products operated by the PPI on each skewers with all data sample vectors. Unfortunately, the BOS method also suffers from the same drawbacks that the PPI does in terms of several parameters which are needed to be determined a priori. Besides, it also has an additional parameter, block size, B needed to be determined where no guideline is provided of how to select this parameter. In this paper, the BOS method is also investigated. Most importantly, a new pyramid-based block design for the BOS method is also introduced as opposed to the cube-based block designed used by Theiler et al.'s BOS. One major advantage of our proposed pyramid-based BOS over Theiler et al.'s cube-design BOS is the hardware design for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) implementation.