Spectral variability is a phenomenon due, to a grand extend, to variations in the illumination and atmospheric conditions within a hyperspectral image, causing the spectral signature of a material to vary within a image. Data spectral fluctuation due to spectral variability compromises the linear mixing model (LMM) sum-to-one constraint, and is an important source of error in hyperspectral image analysis. Recently, spectral variability has raised more attention and some techniques have been proposed to address this issue, i.e. spectral bundles. Here, we propose the definition of an extended LMM (ELMM) to model spectral variability and we show that the use of spectral bundles models the ELMM implicitly. We also show that the constrained least squares (CLS) is an explicit modelling of the ELMM when the spectral variability is due to scaling effects. We give experimental validation that spectral bundles (and sparsity) and CLS are complementary techniques addressing spectral variability. We finally discuss on future research avenues to fully exploit the proposed ELMM.

The binary partition tree (BPT) is a hierarchical region-based representation of an image in a tree structure. The BPT allows users to explore the image at different segmentation scales. Often, the tree is pruned to get a more compact representation and so the remaining nodes conform an optimal partition for some given task. Here, we propose a novel BPT construction approach and pruning strategy for hyperspectral images based on spectral unmixing concepts. Linear spectral unmixing consists of finding the spectral signatures of the materials present in the image (endmembers) and their fractional abundances within each pixel. The proposed methodology exploits the local unmixing of the regions to find the partition achieving a global minimum reconstruction error. Results are presented on real hyperspectral data sets with different contexts and resolutions.

The segmentation of remotely sensed images acquired over tropical forests BPT. An adapted pruning strategy based on the size discontinuity of the merging regions is proposed and compared with an already existing pruning strategy. Finally, a set of criteria to assess the quality of the tree segmentation is introduced. The proposed method correctly segmented up to 68% of the tree crowns and produced reasonable patterns of the segmented landscapes.