How Hyperspectral Image Unmixing and Denoising Can Boost Each Other

Hyperspectral linear unmixing and denoising are highly related hyperspectral image (HSI) analysis tasks. In particular, with the assumption of Gaussian noise, the linear model assumed for the HSI in the case of low-rank denoising is often the same as the one used in HSI unmixing. However, the optimization criterion and the assumptions on the constraints are different. Additionally, noise reduction as a preprocessing step in hyperspectral data analysis is often ignored. The main goal of this paper is to study experimentally the influence of noise on the process of hyperspectral unmixing by: (1) investigating the effect of noise reduction as a preprocessing step on the performance of hyperspectral unmixing; (2) studying the relation between noise and different endmember selection strategies; (3) investigating the performance of HSI unmixing as an HSI denoiser; (4) comparing the denoising performance of spectral unmixing, state-of-the-art HSI denoising techniques, and the combination of both. All experiments are performed on simulated and real datasets.