For the inaccuracy of endmember extraction caused by abnormal noises of data during the mixed pixel decomposition process, particle swarm optimization (PSO), a swarm intelligence algorithm was introduced and improved in the present paper. By re-defining the position and velocity representation and data updating strategies, the algorithm of discrete particle swarm optimization (D-PSO) was proposed, which made it possible to search resolutions in discrete space and ultimately resolve combinatorial optimization problems. In addition, by defining objective functions and feasible solution spaces, endmember extraction was converted to combinatorial optimization problem, which can be resolved by D-PSO. After giving the detailed flow of applying D-PSO to endmember extraction and experiments based on simulative data and real data, it has been verified the algorithm’s flexibility to handle data with abnormal noise and the reliability of endmember extraction were verified. Furthermore, the influence of different parameters on the algorithm’s performances was analyzed thoroughly.