SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DISCRIMINATING CONSTITUENTS OF IMAGE BY COMPLEX SPECTRAL SIGNATURE EXTRACTION

A system and method are provided to operate upon image data electronically captured with complex spectral content in a plurality of image data pixels within a spatial image plane. A plurality of reference components are provided. A discovery processor is coupled to the general dictionary, and is programmably configured to execute a simultaneous sparse approximation process upon image data pixels of at least a portion of the captured image. The discovery processor discovers therefor a set of core spectral signatures defined in terms of selected reference components from the general dictionary. A match processor programmably configured to execute a selective matching process is also provided for transforming individual image data pixels into linear combinations of selected core spectral signatures. The constituent features of the captured image portion corresponding to the selectively matched core spectral signatures are discriminated according to the linear combination thereof.