A fast iterative algorithm for implementation of pixel purity index

The pixel purity index (PPI) has been widely used in hyperspectral image analysis for endmember extraction due to its publicity and availability in the Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) software. Unfortunately, its detailed implementation has never been made available in the literature. This paper investigates the PPI based on limited published results and proposes a fast iterative algorithm to implement the PPI, referred to as fast iterative PPI (FIPPI). It improves the PPI in several aspects. Instead of using randomly generated vectors as initial endmembers, the FIPPI produces an appropriate initial set of endmembers to speed up its process. Additionally, it estimates the number of endmembers required to be generated by a recently developed concept, virtual dimensionality (VD) which is one of the most crucial issues in the implementation of PPI. Furthermore, it is an iterative algorithm, where an iterative rule is developed to improve each of the iterations until it reaches a final set of endmembers. Most importantly, it is an unsupervised algorithm as opposed to the PPI, which requires human intervention to manually select a final set of endmembers. The experiments show that both the FIPPI and the PPI produce very close results, but the FIPPI converges very rapidly with significant savings in computation.