Removing vegetation using unsupervised fully constrained least squares linear spectral mixture analysis method in soils surveying by remote sensing

In the region covered by variable amounts of vegetation, pixel spectra received by remotely-sensed sensor with given spatial resolution are a mixture of soil and vegetation spectra, so vegetation covering on soil influences the accuracy of soils surveying by remote sensing. Mixed pixel spectra are described as a linear combination of endmember signature matrix with appropriate abundance fractions correspond to it in a linear mixture model. According to the principle of this model, abundance fractions of endmembers in every pixel were calculated using unsupervised fully constrained least squares(UFCLS) algorithm. Then the signature of vegetation correspond to its abundance fraction was eliminated, and other endmember signatures covered by vegetation were restituted by scaling their abundance fractions to sum the original pixel total and recalculating the model. After above processing, de-vegetated reflectance images were produced for soils surveying. The accuracies of paddy soils classified using these characteristic images were better than that of using the raw images, but the accuracies of zonal soils were inferior to the latter. Compared to many other image processing methods, such as K-T transformation and ratio bands, the linear spectral unmixing to removing vegetation produced slightly better overall accuracy of soil classification, so it was useful for soils surveying by remote sensing.EI