Progressive Self-Supervised Pretraining for Hyperspectral Image Classification

The challenges in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification lie in the existence of noisy spectral information and lack of contextual information among pixels. Considering the three different levels in HSIs, i.e., subpixel, pixel, and superpixel, offer complementary information, we develop a novel HSI feature learning network (HSINet) to learn consistent features by self-supervision for HSI classification. HSINet contains a three-layer deep neural network and a multifeature convolutional neural network. It automatically extracts the features such as spatial, spectral, color, and boundary as well as context information. To boost the performance of self-supervised feature learning with the likelihood maximization, the conditional random field (CRF) framework is embedded into HSINet. The potential terms of unary, pairwise, and higher order in CRF are constructed by the corresponding subpixel, pixel, and superpixel. Furthermore, the feedback information derived from these terms are also fused into the different-level feature learning process, which makes the HSINet-CRF be a trainable end-to-end deep learning model with the back-propagation algorithm. Comprehensive evaluations are performed on three widely used HSI data sets and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.

In order to improve the classification of hyperspectral image(HSI), we propose a novel hyperspectral image classification method based on the comprehensive evaluation model of extreme learning machine(ELM) with the cumulative variation weights(CVW), referred to as ELM with the cumulative variation weights and comprehensive evaluation (CVW-CEELM). To be specific, the cumulative variation value is proposed as a new metric. The inefficient bands are eliminated by the cumulative variation quotient values based on the cumulative variation values. The cumulative variation weights based on the cumulative variation values are used to determine the contribution of each weak ELM classifier to the hyperspectral image classification algorithm. The remaining effective bands are divided by grouping strategy. In each group of the effective bands, the different numbers of bands are selected to reduce the dimension of the hyperspectral image dataset by the weighted random-selecting-based method. After dimensionality reduction, the spatial-spectral features of each pixel are extracted and multiple weak ELM classifiers are trained by the training samples. Then, the results of several weak classifiers are synthetically evaluated by the cumulative variation weights to get the final classification results. Experimental results on the typical hyperspectral image datasets illustrate that the proposed CVW-CEELM has few adjustable parameters to make the operation simple, and outperforms a variety of the image classification counterparts in terms of the calculation cost and classification accuracy.

Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool in various domains, revolutionising machine learning research. However, one persistent challenge is the scarcity of labelled training data, which hampers the performance and generalisation of deep learning models. To address this limitation, researchers have developed innovative methods to overcome data scarcity and enhance deep model learning capabilities. Two prevalent techniques that have gained significant attention are transfer learning and self-supervised learning. Transfer learning leverages knowledge learned from pre-training on a large-scale dataset, such as ImageNet, and applies it to a target task with limited labelled data. This approach allows models to benefit from the learned representations and effectively transfer knowledge to new tasks, resulting in improved learning performance and generalisation. On the other hand, self-supervised learning focuses on training models using pretext tasks that do not require manual annotation, allowing them to learn valuable representations from large amounts of unlabelled data. These learned representations can then be fine-tuned for downstream tasks, mitigating the need for extensive labelled data. In recent years, transfer and self-supervised learning have found applications in various fields, including medical image processing, video recognition, and natural language processing. These approaches have demonstrated remarkable achievements, enabling breakthroughs in areas such as disease diagnosis, object recognition, and language understanding. However, while these methods offer numerous advantages, they also have limitations. For example, transfer learning may face domain mismatch issues between the pre-training and target domains, while self-supervised learning requires careful design of pretext tasks to ensure meaningful representations. This review paper explores the recent applications of these pre-training methods in various fields within the past three years. It delves into the advantages and limitations of each approach, assesses the performance of models employing these techniques, and identifies potential directions for future research. By providing a comprehensive review of current pre-training methods, this article offers guidance for selecting the best technique for specific deep learning applications to address the data scarcity issue.

Recently, broad learning system (BLS) have demonstrated excellent performance in hyperspectral images (HSI) classification. However, due to the complex geometric structure and spatial layout of HSI, the linear sparse features in broad learning system are difficult to fully represent hyperspectral data. In addition, the features learned by broad learning system lack more effective discriminative ability, which leads to the limited expressive ability of features. To address the issues, we propose a graph convolutional enhanced discriminative broad learning system (GCDBLS) for HSI Classification. GCDBLS aggregates the node information in the adjacency graph through graph convolution, and then learns the context relationship, so as to obtain rich nonlinear spatial spectral features in hyperspectral images; In order to extract more discriminative hyperspectral image features, GCDBLS introduces the concept of local intra-class scatter and local inter-class scatter. By minimizing the local intra-class feature distance and maximizing the local inter-class feature distance, GCDBLS can improve the discrimination ability of BLS extracted features. On three HSI datasets, the experiments compared with the latest classification methods show that the proposed method achieves good results, and improves the classification performance of hyperspectral images.

Recently, graph convolutional network (GCN) has drawn increasing attention in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, as it can process arbitrary non-Euclidean data. However, dynamic GCN that refines the graph heavily relies on the graph embedding in the previous layer, which will result in performance degradation when the embedding contains noise. In this letter, we propose a novel dual residual graph convolutional network (DRGCN) for HSI classification that integrates two adjacency matrices of dual GCN. In detail, one GCN applies a soft adjacency matrix to extract spatial features, the other utilizes the dynamic adjacency matrix to extract global context-aware features. Subsequently, the features extracted by dual GCN are fused to make full use of the complementary and correlated information among two graph representations. Moreover, we introduce residual learning to optimize graph convolutional layers during the training process, to alleviate the over-smoothing problem. The advantage of dual GCN is that it can extract robust and discriminative features from HSI. Extensive experiments on four HSI data sets, including Indian Pines, Pavia University, Salinas, and Houston University, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DRGCN, even with small-sized training data.

Deep learning based methods have recently been successfully explored in hyperspectral image classification field. However, training a deep learning model still requires a large number of labeled samples, which is usually impractical in hyperspectral images. In this paper, a simple but effective feature extraction method is proposed for hyperspectral image classification. Specifically, a pretrained deep convolutional neural network based on the ImageNet dataset is used to extract spatial features of a hyperspectral image. Recently, it is easy to obtain a pretrained convolutional neural network on the Internet. Note that the pretrained models are trained by using the ImageNet dataset. This means that the proposed method does not need labeled hyperspectral samples to train the deep model. Therefore, the proposed method alleviates the problem of lacking labeled samples and avoids the artificial design of feature extraction rules. Finally, the extracted features are stacked with spectral features as the input of a support vector machine classifier. The proposed method is conducted on three widely used hyperspectral image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could outperform the conventional feature extraction methods and deep learning based methods.

Most hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods assume that all classes in the test set are present during training. However, in real-world applications, acquiring labeled training samples is challenging. As a result, it is difficult for the training dataset to cover all possible land cover types, leading to the generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) problem. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have provided rich semantic priors for land cover classes, offering promising potential for GZSL. However, two fundamental gaps hinder their application to HSI classification: the task paradigm gap, arising from the difference between image-level VLMs and the pixel-level HSI classification task; and the knowledge gap, due to the inconsistency between VLM features and HSI spectral–spatial representations. To bridge both gaps, a novel framework leveraging VLM semantic priors for GZSL in HSI classification is proposed, primarily using pseudo-labeling technique to provide knowledge for unseen classes. Specifically, a pseudo-label generation and enhancement module enables a paradigm transition from image-level understanding to pixel-level classification by incorporating HSI’s spatial information. A pseudo-label correction module then refines noisy labels using spectral cues to address the knowledge gap. Finally, a global learning strategy integrates pseudo-label distillation, supervised learning, and feature regularization to classify seen classes while enabling generalization to unseen ones. Experiments on benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate the proposed method’s superiority in generalized zero-shot classification. This work highlights the potential of VLMs in advancing HSI classification in practical applications.

In recent studies, superpixel segmentation has been integrated into hyperspectral (HS) image classification methods. However, the existing superpixel-based classification methods usually suffer from two serious problems. First, the accuracy and efficiency of current superpixel segmentation approaches cannot meet the demands of practical applications for HS images; second, conventional superpixel-based classification methods generally consider each generated superpixel as a unit for the image classification, which may help to reduce the computing time but result in a significant decrease of the classification accuracy. To solve the problems, we propose a fast region growing based superpixel segmentation (FRGSS) algorithm and a novel texture-adaptive superpixel integration strategy (TASIS) for the HS image classification. Experimental results on real Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) HS images demonstrate that the proposed FRGSS outperforms the state-of-the-art superpixel algorithm. In addition, the superiority of the TASIS is verified compared to the pixel-wise and the conventional superpixel-based classification methods.

This paper studies the classification problem of hyperspectral image (HSI). Inspired by the great success of deep neural networks in Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers have proposed different deep learning based algorithms to improve the performance of hyperspectral classification. However, deep learning based algorithms always require a large-scale annotated dataset to provide sufficient training. To address this problem, we propose a semi-supervised deep learning framework based on the residual networks (ResNets), which use very limited labeled data supplemented by abundant unlabeled data. The core of our framework is a novel dual-strategy sample selection co-training algorithm, which can successfully guide ResNets to learn from the unlabeled data by making full use of the complementary cues of the spectral and spatial features in HSI classification. Experiments on the benchmark HSI dataset and real HSI dataset demonstrate that, with a small number of training data, our approach achieves competitive performance with maximum improvement of 41% (compare with traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) with 5 initial training samples per class on Indian Pines dataset) for HSI classification as compared with the results from those state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised methods.

Hyperspectral image classification is a challenging and significant domain in the field of remote sensing with numerous applications in agriculture, environmental science, mineralogy, and surveillance. In the past years, a growing number of advanced hyperspectral remote sensing image classification techniques based on manifold learning, sparse representation and deep learning have been proposed and reported a good performance in accuracy and efficiency on state-of-the-art public datasets. However, most existing methods still face challenges in dealing with large-scale hyperspectral image datasets due to their high computational complexity. In this work, we propose an improved spectral clustering method for large-scale hyperspectral image classification without any prior information. The proposed algorithm introduces two efficient approximation techniques based on Nyström extension and anchor-based graph to construct the affinity matrix. We also propose an effective solution to solve the eigenvalue decomposition problem by multiplicative update optimization. Experiments on both the synthetic datasets and the hyperspectral image datasets were conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated significant breakthroughs in the application of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, some challenging issues still exist, such as the overfitting problem caused by the limitation of training size with high-dimensional feature and the efficiency of spectral–spatial (SS) exploitation. Therefore, to efficiently model the relative position of samples within the generative adversarial network (GAN) setting, we proposed a dual-channel SS fusion capsule generative adversarial network (DcCapsGAN) for HSI classification. Dual channels (1-D-CapsGAN and 2-D-CapsGAN) are constructed by integrating the capsule network (CapsNet) with GAN for eliminating the mode collapse and gradient disappearance problem caused by traditional GAN. Meanwhile, octave convolution and multiscale convolution are integrated into the proposed model for further reducing the parameters of the CapsNet and extracting multiscale features. To further boost the classification performance, the SS channel fusion model is constructed to composite and switch the feature information of different channels, thereby facilitating the accuracy and robustness of the whole classification performance. Three commonly used HSI data sets are utilized to investigate the performance of the proposed DcCapsGAN model, and the performance of the experiment demonstrates that the proposed model can efficiently improve the classification accuracy and performance.

Hyperspectral image classification via nonlocal joint kernel sparse representation based on local covariance

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is an important technology for hyperspectral data analysis, which has the challenge of high dimensionality and limited training samples. Moreover, due to the spatial continuity of material distribution, it is reasonable to improve the performance of HSI classification from the local similarity viewpoint, i.e., pixels in the same local region have a high probability to share similar features. Therefore, in this paper, a novel method based on local similarity and kernel low-rank representation is proposed to improve the classification accuracy for HSI. First, taking into consideration that pixels in the same homogeneous region share similar spectral features (termed local similarity), the HSI is segmented by the superpixel segmentation algorithm to obtain the homogeneous regions. Then, a model of kernel low-rank representation based on local similarity (KLRRLS) is proposed for HSI classification. In the model of KLRRLS, the nonlinear structure characteristics of HSI are extracted by employing the kernel trick, and the low-rank constraint is used as a prior to restrict the recovery coefficient matrix in each segmentation region, thus efficiently solving the linear non-separable problem and exploiting the contextual information of HSI. Finally, the classification results are generated by fusing the result of each segmented map via the maximum voting mechanism. Experimental results on three real HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the classification accuracy.

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification plays a key role remote sensing field. Recently, deep learning has demonstrated its effectiveness in HSI Classification field. This paper presents a spectral-spatial HSI classification technique established on the deep learning based deep belief network (DBN) for deep and abstract feature extraction and adaptive boundary adjustment based segmentation. Proposed approach focuses on integrating the deep learning based spectral features and segmentation based spatial features into a framework for improved performance. Specifically, first the deep DBN model is exploited as a spectral feature extraction based classifier to extract the deep spectral features. Second, spatial contextual features are obtained by utilizing effective adaptive boundary adjustment based segmentation technique. Finally, maximum voting based criteria is operated to integrate the results of extracted spectral and spatial information for improved HSI classification. In general, exploiting spectral features from DBN process and spatial features from segmentation and integration of spectral and spatial information by maximum voting based criteria, has a substantial effect on the performance of HSI classification. Experimental performance on real and widely used hyperspectral data sets with different contexts and resolutions demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed technique and performance is comparable to several recently proposed HSI classification techniques.