Real-time simplex growing algorithms for hyperspectral endmember extraction

The simplex growing algorithm (SGA) was recently developed as an alternative to the N-finder algorithm (N-FINDR) and shown to be a promising endmember extraction technique. This paper further extends the SGA to a versatile real-time (RT) processing algorithm, referred to as RT SGA, which can effectively address the following four major issues arising in the practical implementation for N-FINDR: 1) use of random initial endmembers which causes inconsistent final results; 2) high computational complexity which results from an exhaustive search for finding all endmembers simultaneously; 3) requirement of dimensionality reduction because of large data volumes; and 4) lack of RT capability. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, the proposed RT SGA can also be implemented by various criteria in endmember extraction other than the maximum simplex volume.