An Improved Quantum-Behaved Particle Swarm Optimization for Endmember Extraction

Endmember extraction (EE) plays an important role in the quantitative analysis of hyperspectral images, as the main step in the decomposition of mixed pixels. At present, scholars have proposed many EE algorithms based on the linear spectral mixture model and the convex geometry principle, such as the pixel purity index (PPI) and the vertex component analysis (VCA). At the same time, many intelligent optimization algorithms, such as the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the discrete PSO (DPSO), have been applied to EE, which can get promising results for real images. However, PSO and DPSO have theoretical limitations and cannot guarantee the global convergence. The problem of premature convergence will reduce the accuracy of the EE result. The quantum-behaved PSO (QPSO) can theoretically guarantee the convergence of the algorithm by combining the quantum mechanics into the PSO. In order to increase the accuracy of the algorithm, this paper proposes an improved QPSO (IQPSO) algorithm for EE. IQPSO has made innovations in population coding and initialization methods. Besides, the collaborative approach for updating the optimal positions of particles can help to solve the difficulties caused by high dimensions. The experimental results show that IQPSO can extract endmembers efficiently and effectively.