A New Endmember Preprocessing Method for the Hyperspectral Unmixing of Imagery Containing Marine Oil Spills

The current methods that use hyperspectral remote sensing imagery to extract and monitor marine oil spills are quite popular. However, the automatic extraction of endmembers from hyperspectral imagery remains a challenge. This paper proposes a data field-spectral preprocessing (DSPP) algorithm for endmember extraction. The method first derives a set of extreme points from the data field of an image. At the same time, it identifies a set of spectrally pure points in the spectral space. Finally, the preprocessing algorithm fuses the data field with the spectral calculation to generate a new subset of endmember candidates for the following endmember extraction. The processing time is greatly shortened by directly using endmember extraction algorithms. The proposed algorithm provides accurate endmember detection, including the detection of anomalous endmembers. Therefore, it has a greater accuracy, stronger noise resistance, and is less time-consuming. Using both synthetic hyperspectral images and real airborne hyperspectral images, we utilized the proposed preprocessing algorithm in combination with several endmember extraction algorithms to compare the proposed algorithm with the existing endmember extraction preprocessing algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively extract marine oil spill data.