Algorithm validation using multicolor phantoms

We present a framework for hyperspectral image (HSI) analysis validation, specifically abundance fraction estimation based on HSI measurements of water soluble dye mixtures printed on microarray chips. In our work we focus on the performance of two algorithms, the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and the Spatial LASSO (SPLASSO). The LASSO is a well known statistical method for simultaneously performing model estimation and variable selection. In the context of estimating abundance fractions in a HSI scene, the "sparse" representations provided by the LASSO are appropriate as not every pixel will be expected to contain every endmember. The SPLASSO is a novel approach we introduce here for HSI analysis which takes the framework of the LASSO algorithm a step further and incorporates the rich spatial information which is available in HSI to further improve the estimates of abundance. In our work here we introduce the dye mixture platform as a new benchmark data set for hyperspectral biomedical image processing and show our algorithm's improvement over the standard LASSO.