A robust test for nonlinear mixture detection in hyperspectral images

This paper studies a pixel by pixel nonlinearity detector for hyperspectral image analysis. The reflectances of linearly mixed pixels are assumed to be a linear combination of known pure spectral components (endmembers) contaminated by additive white Gaussian noise. Nonlinear mixing, however, is not restricted to any prescribed nonlinear mixing model. The mixing coefficients (abundances) satisfy the physically motivated sum-to-one and positivity constraints. The proposed detection strategy considers the distance between an observed pixel and the hyperplane spanned by the endmembers to decide whether that pixel satisfies the linear mixing model (null hypothesis) or results from a more general nonlinear mixture (alternative hypothesis). The distribution of this distance is derived under the two hypotheses. Closed-form expressions are then obtained for the probabilities of false alarm and detection as functions of the test threshold. The proposed detector is compared to another nonlinearity detector recently investigated in the literature through simulations using synthetic data. It is also applied to a real hyperspectral image.