Extraction of minerals on the south pole of the planet Mars by unsupervised linear unmixing of hyperspectral images

In this paper, the ability of unsupervised linear unmixing has been evaluated for the hyperspectral image taken on the south pole of the planet Mars by OMEGA instrument aborad MEX. State-of-art methods of the three steps are tested: i) estimation of the number of endmembers; ii) extraction of endmembers; ii) estimation of the abundances. According to the results, it has been found that the combination ELM-VCA-NCLS has the best performance for obtaining the spectral signatures and the abundances of the three principle chemical species (CO₂ ice, water ice and dust) on the south pole of the Mars.