Toward Circumventing Collinearity Effect in Nonlinear Spectral Mixture Analysis by Using a Spectral Shape Measure

Nonlinear spectral mixture analysis (NSMA) is a widely used unmixing algorithm. It can fit the mixed spectra adequately, but collinearity effect among true and virtual endmembers will decrease the retrieval accuracies of endmember fractions. Use of linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) can effectively reduce the degree of collinearity in the NSMA. However, the inadequate modeling of mixed spectra in the LSMA will also yield retrieval errors, especially for the cases where the multiple scattering is not ignorable. In this study, a generalized spectral unmixing scheme based on a spectral shape measure, i.e. spectral information divergence (SID), was applied to overcome the limitations of the conventional NSMA and LSMA. Two simulation experiments were undertaken to test the performances of the SID, LSMA and NSMA in the mixture cases of treesoil, tree-concrete and tree-grass. Results demonstrated that the SID yielded higher accuracies than the LSMA for almost all the mixture cases in this study. On the other hand, performances of the SID method were comparable with the NSMA for the tree-soil and tree-grass mixture cases, but significantly better than the NSMA for the tree-concrete mixture case. All the results indicate that the SID method is fairly effective to circumvent collinearity effect within the NSMA, and compensate the inadequate modeling of mixed spectra within the LSMA.