Spectral Unmixing

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23 papers2 papers in the last four weeks, down 60% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 14, 2026

Spectral World Renderer: Unified 3D Hyperspectral Unmixing

Cameras and the foundation models built on them recognize what a 3D scene contains, but not what it is made of: surfaces of the same colour can be different materials. Hyperspectral unmixing explains each spectrum as a mixture of material signatures, yet in 3D it is applied to rendered images after the views are composited, or tied to slow implicit fields, and no multi-view data with known composition exist to check the result. We present the Spectral World Renderer (SWR), which unifies world generation and unmixing. A coding agent builds executable 3D worlds that are rendered with measured spectra, so every hyperspectral image comes with exact labels and sub-pixel proportions; the resulting SWR-Bench provides eight indoor and outdoor worlds in which decompositions can be verified. SWR then unmixes inside rendering: each Gaussian of a compact 3D representation is decoded into material abundances before compositing, so one render yields spectra and material maps, and any surface can be queried by material name, a clicked pixel or a reference spectrum. Without material labels, SWR identifies materials best in all eight worlds, has the best mean PSNR on real captures, trains 3.7-12.9x faster than unmixing baselines, renders 34.9 labelled views/s and separates same-coloured materials.

Chia-Ming Lee, Yu-Jou Hsiao, Ming-Ching Chang +3

University at Albany, State University of New York · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University · National Cheng Kung University

Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Neural Rendering

Sep 23, 2026

Benchmarking Hyperspectral Foundation Models for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Several foundation models dedicated to hyperspectral images have recently been made available. These models are trained on large unlabeled datasets and exhibit strong performance on many hyperspectral imaging tasks, such as classification or denoising. Nonetheless, their performance for hyperspectral unmixing -- the task of separating mixed spectra of overlapping materials in a hyperspectral image -- remain understudied. This might partly be due to the fact that most of them rely on vision transformer backbones, including patchification, leading to a feature resolution problem. While hyperspectral unmixing already arises from the low resolution of hyperspectral images, this patchification step potentially makes the problem even more ill-posed. Therefore, in this work, we aim to answer two questions: 1) how do foundation models perform in hyperspectral unmixing?; 2) how to tackle the feature-level loss of resolution? To answer the first question, we benchmark foundation models for unmixing, showing that they can reach state-of-the-art performance on four hyperspectral unmixing datasets. To answer the second question, we compare several feature upsampling approaches and empirically show that using a simple one can lead to high performance results. The code is available at https://gitlab.telecom-paris.fr/ring/hfm-hsu.git.

Edgard Dabier, Christophe Kervazo, Pietro Gori +1

LTCI, T´el´ecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

Hyperspectral Imaging Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing

Sep 8, 2026

Interpretable Hyperspectral Unmixing Framework with Fixed Endmember Prior and Structured Residual Refinement

Hyperspectral unmixing decomposes mixed pixels into material endmembers and their abundances from contiguous spectral observations. In modular sensing pipelines, endmembers are often first identified and then treated as fixed during abundance estimation. When this fixed endmember prior is inaccurate, spatially structured mismatch arising from illumination changes, sensor artifacts, or material boundaries may be incorrectly captured by the abundance variables, leading to unstable decompositions. This study presents an interpretable stage-wise hyperspectral unmixing framework (I-HyperSU) under fixed endmember priors, which is explicitly decomposed into a fixed endmember matrix

\mathbf{A}

, an abundance block

\mathbf{X}

, and a structural residual refinement block

\mathbf{S}

. The X-block estimates abundances using FISTA with nonnegativity and sparsity enhancement, and a soft penalty that approximately enforces sum-to-one constraints. The S-block jointly applies low-rank SVD structural regularization and a lightweight deep image prior (DIP) to refine structured residuals. This staged design makes the interaction between abundance and residual components transparent and interpretable. Experiments on Samson, Urban, and Jasper Ridge datasets demonstrate that, under fixed and imperfect endmember priors, soft abundance relaxation consistently outperforms hard simplex projection. Under the default N-FINDR endmember prior, the proposed framework reduces the joint reconstruction error by 61.7%--69.5% compared with a fixed-

\mathbf{A}

UCLS baseline, while keeping the abundance RMSE nearly unchanged, indicating that the residual refinement branch accounts for structured model mismatch without degrading the abundance estimates. For example, on Urban, the reconstruction SAM decreases from

5.99^\circ

for the X-only model to

1.92^\circ

for the full model.

Ziyi Guan, Jianping Zhang, Qian Liu

School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China

Deep Image Prior Hyperspectral Imaging Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing

Sep 8, 2026

AXS-Net: Interpretable Deep Unfolding for Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Spectral Basis Unmixing and Structured Noise Refinement

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often degraded by mixed noise, including band-dependent Gaussian perturbations and structured artifacts such as stripes, dead-lines, and impulse noise. Most deep denoisers regress the clean image directly, entangling signal and structured noise. We instead model HSI denoising as

\Y=\A\X+\Snoise+\Nnoise

, where

\A\X

is a low-rank spectral-subspace (unmixing) reconstruction,

\Snoise

is structured sparse noise and

\Nnoise

is residual Gaussian noise. The resulting regularized optimization problem is unrolled into AXS-Net, a

K

-stage alternating proximal-point framework. Each stage combines an analytic spectral-basis gradient step, an SSX-Block proximal operator for abundance coefficients, and an SBlock proximal operator for the structured residual with column-consistent and sparse priors. This optimization correspondence exposes interpretable endmembers, abundance maps, and structured-noise estimates. Across ICVL, CAVE, and Harvard datasets and five noise configurations, the proposed AXS-Net achieves strong in-domain accuracy and competitive zero-shot transfer, with consistent gains across all five noise regimes on ICVL and Harvard. The recovered structured-noise closely follows the synthetic reference, and the recovered spectral basis is smooth and band-ordered rather than an arbitrary set of latent channels.

Ziyi Guan, Jianping Zhang, Zheng Yang

Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, Hunan, China

Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Deep Unfolding Image Denoising

Sep 4, 2026

What Selects, What Reconstructs: Repairing Exemplar-Based Complex-Spectrum Separation

Exemplar methods separate a mixture by picking one learned spectrum per source and deforming it until it explains the observation, making one deformation class both reconstructor and selector. We show that the second role is empty as soon as the class can interpolate: the rule then ranks candidates on its regulariser, a choice made before the data, and the estimates sum back to the mixture whichever candidate wins. The condition is a parameter count, so the diagnosis runs before any experiment. On free per-bin deformation of complex spectra it explains the observed pathologies at once: a criterion that ranks candidates by their loudness, and half an output that is a mask on the mixture rather than an exemplar. The same theorem prescribes the repair, a selection class poorer than the reconstruction class: one complex gain and one pure delay rank the candidates, and a local combination of the best-aligned atoms, fitted jointly in closed form, rebuilds them. On MUSDB18 against the exact ceiling of the masking class, the distance between the criterion and an oracle inside its own candidate pool falls under the rigid selector from 6.2-7.7 to 0.5-2.8 dB, though only 0.9-1.2 dB of that reaches the output, and the per-frame latency of the deployed rule by a factor of 47 to 806. One lock remains, quantified: atoms are scored against the mixture, so the score carries a term for the other source that absorbs the capacity the reconstruction class gains, leaving the output 10.0 dB under the ceiling. Ranking hypotheses by the residual of a fit free enough to interpolate ranks them on the regulariser alone.

Maxime Baelde

Audio Source Separation Spectral Unmixing Music Information Retrieval

Sep 1, 2026

Agentic Multimodal Models for Environmental Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing is a key task in remote sensing that aims to decompose mixed pixels in hyperspectral images into their constituent material signatures, or endmembers, and their fractional abundances. Conventional modular approaches estimate the scene composition through successive model-order estimation, endmember extraction, and abundance estimation stages, whose errors can lead to redundant or ambiguous candidate components and ultimately affect the recovered decomposition. We introduce an algorithm-agnostic, large vision-language model (LVLM)-driven agentic framework that refines the outputs of such pipelines rather than replacing their underlying numerical algorithms. Starting from an initial decomposition, the agent iteratively gathers complementary spectral and spatial evidence through dedicated tools, including spectral-library retrieval and abundance-map visualization, and modifies the active endmember set through merge and discard operations followed by abundance re-estimation. We apply the same refinement procedure to several modular pipelines combining different model-order, extraction, and abundance-estimation methods, and evaluate it on HYDICE Urban, Jasper Ridge, and Stonewall Playa. Experiments show that the proposed agent consistently improves endmember cardinality and generally improves the recovered spectral signatures and abundance maps across heterogeneous modular pipelines, while remaining competitive with integrated end-to-end unmixing methods, including CNN-AE, uDAS, and R-CoNMF. These results highlight the potential of tool-using LVLM agents to combine spectral and spatial evidence for algorithm-agnostic refinement of physically grounded hyperspectral unmixing decompositions. Code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/agentic-hu.

Michał Cholewa, Luca Ciampi, Nicola Messina +2

IITiS-PAS, Gliwice, Poland · ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Hyperspectral Imaging Hyperspectral Unmixing Multimodal Agents Spectral Unmixing

Aug 31, 2026

Minerals in the Wild: A Hyperspectral-XRF Dataset for Elemental Composition Estimation

Rapid mineral characterization is essential for applications ranging from mineral exploration to industrial ore processing. To this end, Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) has emerged as a promising sensing modality thanks to its fine spectral resolution, enabling mineral discrimination in both close-range and remote sensing settings. However, the scarcity of publicly available datasets with reliable ground-truth labels hinders the development and evaluation of HSI-based mineral identification methods. We release Minerals in the Wild, a multi-purpose dataset comprising 1,132 rock specimens collected across Europe. For each specimen, we provide an HSI acquisition together with an elemental characterization obtained via an XRF sensor. We define the task of elemental characterization on our dataset and propose a pruning mechanism that removes distant signatures from the USGS dictionary prior to a convex optimization approach for matching HSI pixels with USGS spectral signatures. Finally, we empirically show that our approach outperforms simpler baselines.

Eleftheria Tetoula-Tsonga, George Arvanitakis, Theodoros Giannakas

Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece · Geonova, Athens, Greece

Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging

Aug 20, 2026

Decision Tree and K-Means Analysis of Raman Spectra for Edible Oils: A Physics-Informed AI Approach

Classification of edible oils in processed foods is important for food quality, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance. This study develops a Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive framework integrating spectral organization, interpretable classification, Physics-Informed Artificial Intelligence (PI-AI), and Frugal AI-based feature reduction. Five edible oils were analyzed in pure form and within a fried-potato-chip matrix using t-SNE, K-means clustering, Decision Trees, and Non-Negative Least Squares (NNLS)-based spectral decomposition. Unsupervised analyses showed stronger class organization and separability in pure oils, while food-matrix effects caused substantial spectral overlap. Decision Trees achieved 100% classification accuracy for pure oils using only four Raman variables from 1866 spectral features. These variables represented only 0.21% of the available spectral information while retaining perfect test-set performance. Two variables associated with lipid unsaturation (about 1650 cm-1) and hydrocarbon-chain organization (about 1127 cm-1) remained important after NNLS matrix correction. Their combined contribution increased from 50% in pure oils to about 62% and 89% in paper-subtracted and paper-plus-potato-subtracted datasets, respectively. NNLS-based PI-AI improved food-matrix classification by separating oil signatures from paper and potato contributions. Optimized post-pruned models achieved nearly 80% test accuracy using only five and four Raman variables, respectively. The four-feature representation reduced the data footprint by 99.44% without loss of accuracy. These findings demonstrate that Raman-based oil identification can use compact, physically meaningful, and interpretable spectral representations, supporting Frugal AI, Edge AI, portable sensing, and embedded food-quality monitoring.

Amrita Shaw, Chandrasekar S. N., Sai Muthukumar V. +2

Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Vidyagiri, Prasanthi Nilayam, Sri Sathya Sai District, Andhra Pradesh, India – 515134. · Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, 13007, France. · Department of Physics, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Vidyagiri, Prasanthi Nilayam, Sri Sathya Sai District, Andhra Pradesh, India – 515134. +1

Spectral Unmixing Physics-Informed ML Raman Spectroscopy Spectral Methods

Jul 7, 2026

XRFormer: Multiscale Tokenization for XRF Representation Learning

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy is a key modality for material analysis in cultural heritage. However, automated learning from XRF spectra remains challenging: XRF spectra are complex one-dimensional signals composed of sharp elemental peaks, broader structures, and background variations that are not taken into account by existing learning-based models. This paper introduces XRFormer, a transformer architecture tailored to XRF spectra through a multiscale convolutional tokenizer that injects locality and multi-resolution inductive biases before global self-attention. The tokenizer progressively reduces spectral resolution while increasing embedding dimensionality, and the resulting token sequence is processed by a standard transformer encoder. We further investigate self-supervised pretraining for XRF representation learning using Masked Spectral modeling (MSM) and a physics-informed Peak Presence Prediction (PPP) objective. Experiments on the Pigments Checker STANDARD v.5 dataset for pigment identification and unmixing show that XRFormer consistently outperforms ViT, SpectralFormer (with and without CAF), and a 1D-CNN baseline for pigment identification. For pigment unmixing, XRFormer achieves robust abundance estimation while maintaining significantly higher parameter efficiency than SpectralFormer, operating at a lower token resolution (128 vs. 512 tokens) and with less than half the number of parameters (1.5M vs. 3.37M). MSM yields consistent gains across both tasks, while PPP further enhances performance for both identification and unmixing when tuned with an appropriate peak prominence. These results highlight multiscale, modality-aware tokenization as an effective and parameter efficient foundation for transformer-based XRF modeling under data-limited conditions. A GitHub repository is provided at https://github.com/sofiane1010/XRFormer.

Sofiane Daimellah, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Clotilde Boust

Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France · Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, Paris, France

Representation Learning Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures Spectral Unmixing Self-Supervised Pre-Training

May 20, 2026

End-to-End Unmixing with Material Prompts for Hyperspectral Object Tracking

Hyperspectral imagery encodes rich material properties that can improve tracking robustness under appearance ambiguity, illumination change, and background clutter. However, due to the limited availability of hyperspectral video data, many existing methods adapt pretrained RGB trackers via spatial or channel fusion strategies, largely neglecting the intrinsic material information in hyperspectral imagery. Moreover, the few material-aware approaches typically rely on external spectral unmixing pipelines that are decoupled from the tracking objective, limiting effective optimization of material representations for target localization. To address these limitations, we formulate hyperspectral object tracking as a joint optimization problem of material decomposition and target localization, coupling the two tasks via a weighted target-oriented unmixing loss that explicitly aligns material representations with localization accuracy. Specifically, we propose a material representation decomposition module for deep learning-based spectral unmixing with adaptive frequency decomposition. Building on the decomposed material representations, we further introduce a dual-branch wavelet-enhanced material prompt module that learns low- and high-frequency material prompts through efficient spatial-material interactions in the frequency domain. The framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly generalized to different unmixing backbones. Extensive experiments on standard hyperspectral tracking benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and validate the effectiveness of the proposed end-to-end material-aware tracking framework. Code is available at https://github.com/han030927/E2EMPT.

Xu Han, Mohammad Aminul Islam, Lei Wang +5

School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia · Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh 2202, Bangladesh · School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University, Australia +1

Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Hyperspectral Unmixing

May 12, 2026

Bin Latent Transformer (BiLT): A shift-invariant autoencoder for calibration-free spectral unmixing of turbid media

The accurate recovery of constituent-level optical properties from integrating sphere measurements is a central analytical challenge in pharmaceutical analysis, food science, and biomedical diagnostics. Neural network autoencoders can extract spectrally resolved absorption and scattering coefficients for each constituent without prior knowledge, but their fully connected encoders bind learned features to absolute wavelength indices, causing accuracy loss under spectrometer calibration drift or hardware exchange. This work introduces the Bin Latent Transformer (BiLT)-Autoencoder, in which the dense encoder is replaced by a cross-attention scanner: 16 learnable probe vectors query a convolutional feature map, aggregating morphological spectral information independently of absolute wavelength position. A physics-constrained linear decoder with enforced absorption/scattering separation and a three-phase curriculum augmentation strategy complete the architecture. On a liquid phantom benchmark (intralipid and two ink absorbers; 496 samples), the model achieves

R^2 = 0.979

and

0.975

for

μ_a(λ)

and

μ_s'(λ)

, respectively, on held-out test spectra, maintaining

R^2 > 0.90

for

μ_a

and

R^2 \approx 0.99

for

μ_s'

across the full tested shift range of

\pm 10

spectral bands. The model generalises to a simulated spectrometer with a broader instrument line shape (

{\approx}24

nm FWHM) without retraining, retaining

R^2 \approx 0.96

and

0.974

for the two channels. Attention map analysis reveals a physically interpretable two-component probe strategy: sparse anchor probes at absorption-edge wavelengths combined with a diffuse, SNR-driven ensemble at the high-transmittance long-wavelength region, which recruits additional probes dynamically under noise to provide implicit spectral averaging.

Martin Hohmann

Institute of Photonic Technologies (LPT), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Konrad-Zuse-Straße 3/5, 91052 Erlangen, Germany

Spectral Unmixing Autoencoders Transformer Attention Physics-Informed ML Spectral Methods

May 5, 2026

Physics-Guided Regime Unmixing

The Linear Mixing Model (LMM) dominates spectral unmixing for its simplicity, but fails under multiple scattering; existing nonlinear models compensate by applying a fixed regime uniformly across entire scenes. We propose Physics-Guided Regime Unmixing (PGRU), which estimates a pixel-wise scalar

ξ_i \in [0,1]

from observable physical features to activate nonlinear mixing only where justified. Residuals from the Generalized Bilinear Model (GBM), the Post-Nonlinear Mixing Model (PPNM), and Hapke are combined via learned attention, yielding interpretable regime maps. Experiments on Samson, Jasper Ridge, and Urban show consistent improvements over baselines, with physical coherence

ρ> 0.90

.

Paula Pacheco, Pablo Granitto, Juan B. Cabral

GVT-CONAE, Centro Espacial Teófilo Tabanera, Argentina · CONICET, Argentina · FAMAF-UNC, Córdoba, Argentina +1

Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Physics-Informed ML Hyperspectral Unmixing

Apr 24, 2026

A Brain-Inspired Deep Separation Network for Single Channel Raman Spectra Unmixing

Raman spectra obtained in real world applications are often a noisy combination of several spectra of various substances in a tested sample. Unmixing such spectra into individual components corresponding to each of the substances is of great value and has been a longstanding challenge in Raman spectroscopy. Existing unmixing methods are predominantly designed to invert an overdetermined mixed model and therefore require multiple mixed spectra as input. However, open domain and/or non-cooperative detection applications in Raman spectroscopy such as controlled substance detection, call for single-channel solutions which can identify individual components from thousands of candidates by analyzing only a single noisy mixed spectrum. To our knowledge, sparse regression is the only existing solution which can cope with this scenario, yet it has very low tolerance to noises and can hardly be applicable in practice. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel neural approach for single-channel Raman spectrum unmixing inspired by speech separation. It aims at solving underdetermined systems and can decompose a noisy mixed spectrum from a library of thousands of components (substances). The core of our method is a deep separation neural network (RSSNet) which takes a mixed spectrum as input and outputs spectra of pure components. We created two synthetic datasets of single-channel Raman spectra unmixing and demonstrated feasibility and superiority of RSSNet on these datasets (outperform competing methods by >4dB). Furthermore, we verified that RSSNet, trained solely on synthetic data, can successfully unmix real-world mixed spectra of mixtures of mineral powders, exhibiting strong generalization. Our approach represents a new paradigm for Raman unmixing and enables new possibilities for fast detection of Raman mixtures.

Gaoruishu Long, Jinchao Liu, Bo Liu +2

College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin, China · Guangdong Laboratory of Chemistry and Fine Chemical Industry, Guangdong, China · Smekal Tech (Shantou) Ltd. +1

Raman Spectroscopy Spectral Methods Spectral Unmixing

Apr 18, 2026

Hyperspectral Unmixing Hierarchies

Unmixing reveals the spatial distribution and spectral details of different constituents, called endmembers, in a hyperspectral image. Because unmixing has limited ground truth requirements, can accommodate mixed pixels, and is closely tied to light propagation, it is a uniquely powerful tool for analyzing hyperspectral images. However, spectral variability inhibits unmixing performance, the proper way to determine the number of endmembers is ambiguous, and the clarity of the endmembers degrades as more are included. Hierarchical structure is a possible solution to all three problems. Here, hierarchical unmixing is defined by imposing a hierarchical abundance sum constraint on Deep Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. Binary Linear Unmixing Tactile Hierarchies (BLUTHs) solve the hierarchical unmixing problem with a simple network architecture. Sparsity modulation unmixing growth tailors the topology of a BLUTH to each scene. The structure imposed by BLUTHs allows endmembers with varying levels of spectral contrast to be revealed, mitigating the challenge of spectral variability. The performance of BLUTHs exceeds state-of-the-art unmixing algorithms on laboratory scenes, particularly with regard to abundance estimation, while their performance remains competitive on remote sensing scenes. In addition, ocean color unmixing by BLUTHs is demonstrated on hyperspectral scenes from the HYPSO and PACE satellites.

Joseph L. Garrett, P. S. Vishnu, Pauliina Salmi +4

Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology · Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology · Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University Politehnica Bucharest +1

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Remote Sensing Hyperspectral Imaging Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing

Apr 13, 2026

A Deep Equilibrium Network for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is crucial for analyzing hyperspectral imagery, yet achieving accurate unmixing remains challenging. While traditional methods struggle to effectively model complex spectral-spatial features, deep learning approaches often lack physical interpretability. Unrolling-based methods, despite offering network interpretability, inadequately exploit spectral-spatial information and incur high memory costs and numerical precision issues during backpropagation. To address these limitations, we propose DEQ-Unmix, which reformulates abundance estimation as a deep equilibrium model, enabling efficient constant-memory training via implicit differentiation. It replaces the gradient operator of the data reconstruction term with a trainable convolutional network to capture spectral-spatial information. By leveraging implicit differentiation, DEQ-Unmix enables efficient and constant-memory backpropagation. Experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate that DEQ-Unmix achieves superior unmixing performance while maintaining constant memory cost.

Chentong Wang, Jincheng Gao, Fei Zhu +1

Center for Applied Mathematics, KL-AAGDM, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China · School of Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China · National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology

Implicit Differentiation Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging

Apr 10, 2026

Unmixing-Guided Spatial-Spectral Mamba with Clustering Tokens for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Although hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is critical for supporting various environmental applications, it is a challenging task due to the spectral-mixture effect, the spatial-spectral heterogeneity and the difficulty to preserve class boundaries and details. This letter presents a novel unmixing-guided spatial-spectral Mamba with clustering tokens for improved HSI classification, with the following contributions. First, to disentangle the spectral mixture effect in HSI for improved pattern discovery, we design a novel spectral unmixing network that not only automatically learns endmembers and abundance maps from HSI but also accounts for endmember variabilities. Second, to generate Mamba token sequences, based on the clusters defined by abundance maps, we design an efficient Top-K token selection strategy to adaptively sequence the tokens for improved representational capability. Third, to improve spatial-spectral feature learning and detail preservation, based on the Top-K token sequences, we design a novel unmixing-guided spatial-spectral Mamba module that greatly improves traditional Mamba models in terms of token learning and sequencing. Fourth, to learn simultaneously the endmember-abundance patterns and classification labels, a multi-task scheme is designed for model supervision, leading to a new unmixing-classification framework that outputs not only accurate classification maps but also a comprehensive spectral-library and abundance maps. Comparative experiments on four HSI datasets demonstrate that our model can greatly outperform the other state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/GSIL-UCalgary/Unmixing_guided_Mamba.git

Yimin Zhu, Lincoln Linlin Xu

Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada

Hyperspectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Image Classification Hyperspectral Imaging Mamba Spectral Unmixing

Apr 1, 2026

Looking into a Pixel by Nonlinear Unmixing -- A Generative Approach

Due to the large footprint of pixels in remote sensing imagery, hyperspectral unmixing (HU) has become an important and necessary procedure in hyperspectral image analysis. Traditional HU methods rely on a prior spectral mixing model, especially for nonlinear mixtures, which has largely limited the performance and generalization capacity of the unmixing approach. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of hyperspectral nonlinear unmixing (HNU) without explicit knowledge of the mixing model. Inspired by the principle of generative models, where images of the same distribution can be generated as that of the training images without knowing the exact probability distribution function of the image, we develop an invertible mixing-unmixing process via a bi-directional GAN framework, constrained by both the cycle consistency and the linkage between linear and nonlinear mixtures. The combination of cycle consistency and linear linkage provides powerful constraints without requiring an explicit mixing model. We refer to the proposed approach as the linearly-constrained CycleGAN unmixing net, or LCGU net. Experimental results indicate that the proposed LCGU net exhibits stable and competitive performance across different datasets compared with other state-of-the-art model-based HNU methods.

Maofeng Tang, Hairong Qi

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Generative Adversarial Networks

Mar 31, 2026

Polyhedral Unmixing: Bridging Semantic Segmentation with Hyperspectral Unmixing via Polyhedral-Cone Partitioning

Semantic segmentation and hyperspectral unmixing are two central problems in spectral image analysis. The former assigns each pixel a discrete label corresponding to its material class, whereas the latter estimates pure material spectra, called endmembers, and, for each pixel, a vector representing material abundances in the observed scene. Despite their complementarity, these two problems are usually addressed independently. This paper aims to bridge these two lines of work by formally showing that, under the linear mixing model, pixel classification by dominant materials induces polyhedral-cone regions in the spectral space. We leverage this fundamental property to propose a direct segmentation-to-unmixing pipeline that performs blind hyperspectral unmixing from any semantic segmentation by constructing a polyhedral-cone partition of the space that best fits the labeled pixels. Signed distances from pixels to the estimated regions are then computed, linearly transformed via a change of basis in the distance space, and projected onto the probability simplex, yielding an initial abundance estimate. This estimate is used to extract endmembers and recover final abundances via matrix pseudo-inversion. Because the segmentation method can be freely chosen, the user gains explicit control over the unmixing process, while the rest of the pipeline remains essentially deterministic and lightweight. Beyond improving interpretability, experiments on three real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when associated with appropriate clustering algorithms, and show consistent improvements over recent deep and non-deep state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/antoine-bottenmuller/polyhedral-unmixing

Antoine Bottenmuller, Etienne Decencière, Petr Dokládal

CMM, PSL, STIM · Mines Paris, PSL University, Centre for Mathematical Morphology (CMM), 77300 Fontainebleau, France

Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging

Mar 24, 2026

λSplit: Self-Supervised Content-Aware Spectral Unmixing for Fluorescence Microscopy

In fluorescence microscopy, spectral unmixing aims to recover individual fluorophore concentrations from spectral images that capture mixed fluorophore emissions. Since classical methods operate pixel-wise and rely on least-squares fitting, their performance degrades with increasingly overlapping emission spectra and higher levels of noise, suggesting that a data-driven approach that can learn and utilize a structural prior might lead to improved results. Learning-based approaches for spectral imaging do exist, but they are either not optimized for microscopy data or are developed for very specific cases that are not applicable to fluorescence microscopy settings. To address this, we propose λSplit, a physics-informed deep generative model that learns a conditional distribution over concentration maps using a hierarchical Variational Autoencoder. A fully differentiable Spectral Mixer enforces consistency with the image formation process, while the learned structural priors enable state-of-the-art unmixing and implicit noise removal. We demonstrate λSplit on 3 real-world datasets that we synthetically cast into a total of 66 challenging spectral unmixing benchmarks. We compare our results against a total of 10 baseline methods, including classical methods and a range of learning-based methods. Our results consistently show competitive performance and improved robustness in high noise regimes, when spectra overlap considerably, or when the spectral dimensionality is lowered, making λSplit a new state-of-the-art for spectral unmixing of fluorescent microscopy data. Importantly, λSplit is compatible with spectral data produced by standard confocal microscopes, enabling immediate adoption without specialized hardware modifications.

Federico Carrara, Talley Lambert, Mehdi Seifi +1

Fondazione Human Technopole, Milan, Italy · Università Campus Bio-Medico, Rome, Italy · Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Spectral Unmixing Microscopy Image Analysis Fluorescence Microscopy Hyperspectral Imaging Physics-Informed ML

Mar 23, 2026

Unregistered Spectral Image Fusion: Unmixing, Adversarial Learning, and Recoverability

This paper addresses the fusion of a pair of spatially unregistered hyperspectral image (HSI) and multispectral image (MSI) covering roughly overlapping regions. HSIs offer high spectral but low spatial resolution, while MSIs provide the opposite. The goal is to integrate their complementary information to enhance both HSI spatial resolution and MSI spectral resolution. While hyperspectral-multispectral fusion (HMF) has been widely studied, the unregistered setting remains challenging. Many existing methods focus solely on MSI super-resolution, leaving HSI unchanged. Supervised deep learning approaches were proposed for HSI super-resolution, but rely on accurate training data, which is often unavailable. Moreover, theoretical analyses largely address the co-registered case, leaving unregistered HMF poorly understood. In this work, an unsupervised framework is proposed to simultaneously super-resolve both MSI and HSI. The method integrates coupled spectral unmixing for MSI super-resolution with latent-space adversarial learning for HSI super-resolution. Theoretical guarantees on the recoverability of the super-resolution MSI and HSI are established under reasonable generative models -- providing, to our best knowledge, the first such insights for unregistered HMF. The approach is validated on semi-real and real HSI-MSI pairs across diverse conditions.

Jiahui Song, Sagar Shrestha, Xiao Fu

The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, United States.

Spectral Unmixing Multi-Source Image Fusion Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution Hyperspectral Imaging Image Super-Resolution

Mar 13, 2026

MiSiSUn: Minimum Simplex Semisupervised Unmixing

This paper proposes a semisupervised geometric unmixing approach called minimum simplex semisupervised unmixing (MiSiSUn). The geometry of the data was incorporated for the first time into library-based unmixing using a simplex-volume-flavored penalty based on an archetypal analysis-type linear model. The experimental results were performed on two simulated datasets considering different levels of mixing ratios and spatial instruction at varying input noise. MiSiSUn considerably outperforms state-of-the-art semisupervised unmixing methods. The improvements vary from 1 dB to over 3 dB in different scenarios. The proposed method was also applied to a real dataset where visual interpretation is close to the geological map. MiSiSUn was implemented using PyTorch, which is open-source and available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/MiSiSUn. Moreover, we provide a dedicated Python package for Semisupervised Unmixing, which is open-source and includes all the methods used in the experiments for the sake of reproducibility.

Behnood Rasti, Bikram Koirala, Paul Scheunders

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany · Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), 10623 Berlin, Germany · Imec-VisionLab, Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Semi-Supervised Learning

Mar 10, 2026

WS-Net: Weak-Signal Representation Learning and Gated Abundance Reconstruction for Hyperspectral Unmixing via State-Space and Weak Signal Attention Fusion

Weak spectral responses in hyperspectral images are often obscured by dominant endmembers and sensor noise, resulting in inaccurate abundance estimation. This paper introduces WS-Net, a deep unmixing framework specifically designed to address weak-signal collapse through state-space modelling and Weak Signal Attention fusion. The network features a multi-resolution wavelet-fused encoder that captures both high-frequency discontinuities and smooth spectral variations with a hybrid backbone that integrates a Mamba state-space branch for efficient long-range dependency modelling. It also incorporates a Weak Signal Attention branch that selectively enhances low-similarity spectral cues. A learnable gating mechanism adaptively fuses both representations, while the decoder leverages KL-divergence-based regularisation to enforce separability between dominant and weak endmembers. Experiments on one simulated and two real datasets (synthetic dataset, Samson, and Apex) demonstrate consistent improvements over six state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 55% and 63% reductions in RMSE and SAD, respectively. The framework maintains stable accuracy under low-SNR conditions, particularly for weak endmembers, establishing WS-Net as a robust and computationally efficient benchmark for weak-signal hyperspectral unmixing.

Zekun Long, Ali Zia, Guanyiman Fu +2

School of Information and Communication Technology, Griﬃth University, Brisbane, QLD 4111, Australia · School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia · CSIRO Agriculture and Food, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

Hyperspectral Unmixing Spectral Unmixing Hyperspectral Imaging Representation Learning

Feb 18, 2026

Optical Inversion and Spectral Unmixing of Spectroscopic Photoacoustic Images with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Accurate estimation of the relative concentrations of chromophores in a spectroscopic photoacoustic (sPA) image can reveal immense structural, functional, and molecular information about physiological processes. However, due to nonlinearities and ill-posedness inherent to sPA imaging, concentration estimation is intractable. The Spectroscopic Photoacoustic Optical Inversion Autoencoder (SPOI-AE) aims to address the sPA optical inversion and spectral unmixing problems without assuming linearity. Herein, SPOI-AE was trained and tested on in vivo mouse lymph node sPA images with unknown ground truth chromophore concentrations. SPOI-AE better reconstructs input sPA pixels than conventional algorithms while providing biologically coherent estimates for optical parameters, chromophore concentrations, and the percent oxygen saturation of tissue. SPOI-AE's unmixing accuracy was validated using a simulated mouse lymph node phantom ground truth.

Sarkis Ter Martirosyan, Xinyue Huang, David Qin +2

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, United States · Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging, Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany · Chair of Biological Imaging, Technische Universität München, 80333 München, Germany +1

Spectral Unmixing Medical Imaging Image Inverse Problems Autoencoders Physics-Informed ML