A novel approach for spectral unmixing, classification, and concentration estimation of chemical and biological agents

In this paper, spectral unmixing methods, which are extensively used in hyperspectral imaging area, are proposed for classification and abundance fraction (concentration) estimation of chemical and biological agents that exist in the mixture form. Several government-furnished datasets, which were collected through the infrared spectrum method, were thoroughly analyzed. Two similarity measures-the spectral angle mapper and spectral information divergence-were investigated in order to provide a quantitative comparison basis with respect to the performance of the applied spectral unmixing methods in the existence of similar and distinct agents. The use of the similarity measures provided valuable information about the signature characteristics of the agents, which led to a better understanding about the capabilities of the investigated methods. The orthogonal subspace projection (OSP) method was investigated as the first unmixing, classification, and abundance estimation technique. It was observed that the OSP method provided good results when the number of agents in the database was small and was composed of distinct agents. However, when the number of agents was incremented by adding agents that share similar characteristics, the abundance estimation accuracy gradually degraded in addition to generating negative abundance fraction estimates. The second investigated unmixing method was called nonnegatively constrained least squares (NCLS). The results and analyses indicated that the NCLS method outperformed the OSP approach by providing considerably more accurate fraction estimates while at the same time not generating any negative fraction estimates; thus, the use of the NCLS method was found to be promising in detection and abundance fraction estimation of chemical and biological agents that exist in the form of mixtures. In addition, efficient implementation of NCLS has resulted in much lower computations than the conventional OSP implementation.