Hierarchical Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis (MESMA) of hyperspectral imagery for urban environments

Remote sensing has considerable potential for providing accurate, up-to-date information in urban areas. Urban remote sensing is complicated, however, by very high spectral and spatial complexity. In this paper, Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis (MESMA) was applied to map urban land cover using HyMap data acquired over the city of Bonn, Germany. MESMA is well suited for urban environments because it allows the number and types of endmembers to vary on a per-pixel basis, which allows controlling the large spectral variability in these environments. We employed a hierarchical approach, in which MESMA was applied to map four levels of complexity ranging from the simplest level consisting of only two classes, impervious and pervious, to 20 classes that differentiated material composition and plant species. Lower levels of complexity, mapped at the highest accuracies, were used to constrain spatially models at higher levels of complexity, reducing spectral confusion between materials. A spectral library containing 1521 endmembers was created from the HyMap data. Three endmember selection procedures, Endmember Average RMS (EAR), Minimum Average Spectral Angle (MASA) and Count Based Endmember Selection (COB), were used to identify the most representative endmembers for each level of complexity. Combined two-, three- or four-endmember models – depending on the hierarchical level – were applied, and the highest endmember fractions were used to assign a land cover class. Classification accuracies of 97.2% were achieved for the two lowest complexity levels, consisting of impervious and pervious classes, and a four class map consisting of vegetation, bare soil, water and built-up. At the next level of complexity, consisting of seven classes including trees, grass, bare soil, river, lakes/basins, road and roof/building, classification accuracies remained high at 81.7% with most classes mapped above 85% accuracy. At the highest level, consisting of 20 land cover classes, a 75.9% classification accuracy was achieved. The ability of MESMA to incorporate within-class spectral variability, combined with a hierarchical approach that uses spatial information from one level to constrain model selection at a higher level of complexity was shown to be particularly well suited for urban environments.