On the decomposition of Mars hyperspectral data by ICA and Bayesian positive source separation

The surface of Mars is currently being imaged with an unprecedented combination of spectral and spatial resolution. This high resolution, and its spectral range, give the ability to pinpoint chemical species on the surface and the atmosphere of Mars moreaccurately than before. The subject of this paper is to present a method to extract informations on these chemicals from hyperspectral images. A first approach, based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) [1], is able to extract artifacts and locations of CO2 and H2O ices. However, the main independence assumption and some basic properties (like the positivity of images and spectra) being unverified, the reliability of all the independent components (ICs) is weak. For improving the component extraction and consequently the endmember classification, a combination of spatial ICA with spectral Bayesian Positive Source Separation (BPSS) [2] is proposed. To reduce the computational burden, the basic idea is to use spatial ICA yielding a rough classification of pixels, which allows selection of small, but relevant, number of pixels and then BPSS is applied for the estimation of the source spectra using the spectral mixtures provided by this reduced set of pixels. Finally, the abundances of the components is assessed on the whole pixels of the images. Results of this approach are shown and evaluated by comparison with available reference spectra.