FPGA Design and Implementation of a Fast Pixel Purity Index Algorithm for Endmember Extraction in Hyperspectral Imagery

Hyperspectral imagery is a class of image data which is used in many scientific areas, most notably, medical imaging and remote sensing. It is characterized by a wealth of spatial and spectral information. Over the last years, many algorithms have been developed with the purpose of finding “spectral endmembers,” which are assumed to be pure signatures in remotely sensed hyperspectral data sets. Such pure signatures can then be used to estimate the abundance or concentration of materials in mixed pixels, thus allowing sub-pixel analysis which is crucial in many remote sensing applications due to current sensor optics and configuration. One of the most popular endmember extraction algorithms has been the pixel purity index (PPI), available from Kodak’s Research Systems ENVI software package. This algorithm is very time consuming, a fact that has generally prevented its exploitation in valid response times in a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring, military applications or hazard and threat assessment/tracking (including wildland fire detection, oil spill mapping and chemical and biological standoff detection). Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are hardware components with millions of gates. Their reprogrammability and high computational power makes them particularly attractive in remote sensing applications which require a response in near real-time. In this paper, we present an FPGA design for implementation of PPI algorithm which takes advantage of a recently developed fast PPI (FPPI) algorithm that relies on software-based optimization. The proposed FPGA design represents our first step toward the development of a new reconfigurable system for fast, onboard analysis of remotely sensed hyperspectral imagery.