Support Vector Machine-Based Endmember Extraction

Introduced in this paper is the utilization of support vector machines (SVMs) to semiautomatically perform endmember extraction from hyperspectral data. The strengths of SVM are exploited to provide a fast and accurate calculated representation of high-dimensional data sets that may consist of multiple distributions. Once this representation is computed, the number of distributions can be determined without prior knowledge. For each distribution, an optimal transform can be determined that preserves informational content while reducing the data dimensionality and, hence, the computational cost. Finally, endmember extraction for the whole data set is accomplished. Results indicate that this SVM-based endmember extraction algorithm has the capability of semiautonomously determining endmembers from multiple clusters with computational speed and accuracy while maintaining a robust tolerance to noise.