Unsupervised nonlinear unmixing of hyperspectral images using Gaussian processes

This paper describes a Gaussian process based method for nonlinear hyperspectral image unmixing. The proposed model assumes a nonlinear mapping from the abundance vectors to the pixel reflectances contaminated by an additive white Gaussian noise. The parameters involved in this model satisfy physical constraints that are naturally expressed within a Bayesian framework. The proposed abundance estimation procedure is applied simultaneously to all pixels of the image by maximizing an appropriate posterior distribution which does not depend on the endmembers. After determining the abundances of all image pixels, the endmembers contained in the image are estimated by using Gaussian process regression. The performance of the resulting unsupervised unmixing strategy is evaluated through simulations conducted on synthetic data.