Target signature-constrained mixed pixel classification for hyperspectral imagery

Linear spectral mixture analysis has been widely used for subpixel detection and mixed pixel classification. When it is implemented as constrained LSMA, the constraints are generally imposed on abundance fractions in the mixture. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach, which imposes constraints on target signature vectors rather than target abundance fractions. The idea is to constrain directions of target signature vectors of interest in two different ways. One, referred to as linearly constrained minimum variance approach develops a linear filter to constrain these target signature vectors along preassigned directions using a set of specific filter gains while minimizing the filter output variance. Another, referred to as the linearly constrained discriminant analysis (LCDA), is derived from Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis, but constrains the Fisher’s discriminant vectors along predetermined directions to improve classification performance. Recently, Bowles et al. introduced another target signature-constrained approach, referred to as filter-vectors method, which requires a linear mixture model to implement constraints on target signature vectors. Interestingly, it turns out that the filter-vectors method can be considered as a special version of both linearly constrained minimum variance and linearly constrained discriminant analysis approaches.