Kronecker least angle regression for unsupervised unmixing of hyperspectral imaging data

Spectral unmixing is an important data processing task that is commonly applied to hyperspectral imaging data. It uses a set of spectral pixels, i.e., multichannel data, to separate each spectral pixel, a multicomponent signal comprised of a linear mixture of pure spectral signatures, into its individual spectral signatures commonly known as endmembers. When no prior information about the required endmembers is available, the resulting unsupervised unmixing problem will be underdetermined, and additional constraints become necessary. A recent approach to solving this problem required that these endmembers be sparse in some dictionary. Sparse signal recovery is commonly solved using a basis pursuit optimization algorithm that requires specifying a data-dependent regularization parameter. Least angle regression (LARS) is a very efficient method to simultaneously solve the basis pursuit optimization problem for all relevant regularization parameter values. However, despite this efficiency of LARS, it has not been applied to the spectral unmixing problem before. This is likely because the application of LARS to large multichannel data could be very challenging in practice, due to the need for generation and storage of extremely large arrays (~ 10 10  bytes in a relatively small area of spectral unmixing problem). In this paper, we extend the standard LARS algorithm, using Kronecker products, to make it suitable for practical and efficient recovery of sparse signals from large multichannel data, i.e., without the need to construct or process very large arrays, or the need for trial and error to determine the regularization parameter value. We then apply this new Kronecker LARS (K-LARS) algorithm to successfully achieve spectral unmixing of both synthetic and AVIRIS hyperspectral imaging data. We also compare our results to ones obtained using an earlier basis pursuit -based spectral unmixing algorithm, generalized morphological component analysis (GMCA). We show that these two results are similar, albeit our results were obtained without trial and error, or arbitrary choices, in specifying the regularization parameter. More important, our K-LARS algorithm could be a very valuable research tool to the signal processing community, where it could be used to solve sparse least squares problems involving large multichannel data.