Spatial Sequential Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

ABSTRACTConvolutional neural network (CNN) for hyperspectral image classification can provide excellent performance when the number of labeled samples for training is sufficiently large. Unfortunately, a small number of labeled samples are available for training in hyperspectral images. In this letter, a novel semi-supervised convolutional neural network is proposed for the classification of hyperspectral image. The proposed network can automatically learn features from complex hyperspectral image data structures. Furthermore, skip connection parameters are added between the encoder layer and decoder layer in order to make the network suitable for semi-supervised learning. Semi-supervised method is adopted to solve the problem of limited labeled samples. Finally, the network is trained to simultaneously minimize the sum of supervised and unsupervised cost functions. The proposed network is conducted on a widely used hyperspectral image data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides competitive results to state-of-the-art methods.

Fuzzy graph convolutional network for hyperspectral image classification

Dual selective fusion transformer network for hyperspectral image classification.

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.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) collects hundreds of images over large spatial observation areas on the Earth’s surface, recording scenes at different wavelength channels and providing a vast amount of information. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used for the classification of HSI datasets, understood as a single sequence of pixel vectors with high dimensionality. However, the RNN model scales poorly when dealing with HSI scenes with large dimensionality. In order to mitigate this problem, this paper presents a new RNN classifier based on simple recurrent units that performs HSI classification in a highly scalable and efficient way. Our experimental results (conducted on four real HSI datasets) reveal very good performance, not only in terms of classification accuracy (in line with existing methods), but also in terms of computational performance when dealing with large datasets.

Over the past few years making use of deep networks, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), classifying hyperspectral images has progressed significantly and gained increasing attention. In spite of being successful, these networks need an adequate supply of labeled training instances for supervised learning, which, however, is quite costly to collect. On the other hand, unlabeled data can be accessed in almost arbitrary amounts. Hence it would be conceptually of great interest to explore networks that are able to exploit labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously for hyperspectral image classification. In this article, we propose a novel graph-based semisupervised network called nonlocal graph convolutional network (nonlocal GCN). Unlike existing CNNs and RNNs that receive pixels or patches of a hyperspectral image as inputs, this network takes the whole image (including both labeled and unlabeled data) in. More specifically, a nonlocal graph is first calculated. Given this graph representation, a couple of graph convolutional layers are used to extract features. Finally, the semisupervised learning of the network is done by using a cross-entropy error over all labeled instances. Note that the nonlocal GCN is end-to-end trainable. We demonstrate in extensive experiments that compared with state-of-the-art spectral classifiers and spectral-spatial classification networks, the nonlocal GCN is able to offer competitive results and high-quality classification maps (with fine boundaries and without noisy scattered points of misclassification).

Recently, deep learning methods, for example, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have achieved high performance in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. The limited training samples of HSI images make it hard to use deep learning methods with many layers and a large number of convolutional kernels as in large scale imagery tasks, and CNN-based methods usually need long training time. In this paper, we present a wide sliding window and subsampling network (WSWS Net) for HSI classification. It is based on layers of transform kernels with sliding windows and subsampling (WSWS). It can be extended in the wide direction to learn both spatial and spectral features more efficiently. The learned features are subsampled to reduce computational loads and to reduce memorization. Thus, layers of WSWS can learn higher level spatial and spectral features efficiently, and the proposed network can be trained easily by only computing linear weights with least squares. The experimental results show that the WSWS Net achieves excellent performance with different hyperspectral remotes sensing datasets compared with other shallow and deep learning methods. The effects of ratio of training samples, the sizes of image patches, and the visualization of features in WSWS layers are presented.

Although most deep learning-based methods have achieved excellent performance for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, they are often limited by complex networks and require massive training samples in practical applications. Therefore, designing an efficient, lightweight model to obtain better classification results under small samples situations remains a challenging task. To alleviate this problem, a novel, lightweight parallel octave convolutional neural network (LPOCNN) for HSI classification is proposed in this paper. First, the HSI data is preprocessed to construct two three-dimensional (3D) patch cubes with different spatial and spectral scales for each central pixel, removing redundancy and focusing on extracting spatial features and spectral features, respectively. Next, two non- deep parallel branches are created for the two inputs, which design octave convolution rather than classical 3D convolution to facilitate light weighting of the model. Then two-dimensional convolutional neural network is used to extract deeper spectral-spatial features when fusing spectral-spatial features from different parallel layers. Moreover, the spectral-spatial attention is designed to promote the classification performance even further by adaptively adjusting the weights of different spectral-spatial features according to their contribution to classification. Experiments show that our suggested LPOCNN acquires a significant advantage on classification performance over other competitive methods under small sample situations.

Traditional hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods mainly include machine learning and convolutional neural network. However, they extremely depend on the large training samples. To obtain high accuracy on limited training samples, we propose a novel end-to-end spectral-spatial multi-scale network (SSMSN) for HSI classification. The SSMSN uses the multi-scale spectral module and the multi-scale spatial module to extract discriminative multi-scale spectral and multi-scale spatial features separately. In the multi-scale spectral module and spatial module, the multi-scale Res2Net block structure can learn multi-scale features at a granular level and increase the range of receptive fields by constructing the hierarchical residual-like connection within one single residual block. To alleviate the overfitting problem and further improve the classification accuracy on limited training samples, we adopt a simple but effective hinge cross-entropy loss function to train the SSMSN at the dynamic learning rate. A large number of experimental results demonstrate that on the Indiana Pines, University of Pavia, Kennedy Space Center, and Salinas Scene data sets, the proposed SSMSN achieves higher classification accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on limited training samples. Meanwhile, our SSMSN obtains less training and testing time than the popular AUSSC method.

In hyperspectral image (HSI) classification task, effectively deriving and incorporating spatial information into spectral features is one of a key focus as it can largely influence the performance. Markov random fields (MRFs) are generative and flexible image texture models, and capable of effectively extracting spatial neighbourhood information along multiple spectral wavebands in an unsupervised way. Its parameter estimation process also shares strong compatibility with deep architecture, especially the convolutional neural networks. In this work, we propose an MRF based spectral-spatial fusion network (SSFNet) for HSI classification. Spatial features are extracted using MRF models and further fused with spectral information. Then the proposed SSFNet takes the fused features as input and produces reliable classification results. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the Indian pines and the Pavia university datasets are reported to verify the proposed method.

Abstract. Hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain hundreds of spectral bands, providing high-resolution spectral information pertaining to the Earth’s surface. Additionally, abundant spatial contextual information can also be obtained simultaneously from a HSI. To characterize the properties of ground objects, classification is the most widely-used technology in the field of remote sensing, where each pixel in a HSI is assigned to a pre-defined class. Over the past decade, deep learning has attracted increasing attention in the machine-learning and computer-vision domains, due to its favourable performances for various types of tasks, and it has been successfully introduced to the remote-sensing community. Instead of utilizing the shallow features within in a given image, which is the approach that is generally adopted in other conventional classification methods, deep-learning algorithms can extract hierarchical features from raw HSI data. Within the deep-learning framework, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are able to encode sequential features, have exhibited promising capabilities and have achieved encouraging performances, especially for the natural-language processing and speech-recognition communities. As multi-temporal remote-sensing images can be readily obtained from increasing numbers of satellite and unmanned aircraft systems, and since analysis of such multi-temporal data comprises a critical issue within numerous research subfields, including land-cover and land-change analyses, and land-resource management, RNNs have been applied in recent studies in order to extract temporal sequential features from multi-temporal remote-sensing images for the purpose of image classification. Apart from using multi-temporal image datasets, RNNs can also be utilized on a single image, where the spectral feature/band of each individual pixel can be taken as a sequential feature for the input layer of RNNs. However, the application of such sequential feature extraction that relies on a single image still needs to be further investigated since applying RNNs to spectral bands will directly introduce more parameters that need to be optimized, consequently increasing the total training time.In this study, we propose a novel RNN-based HSI classification framework. In this framework, unlabelled pixels obtained from a single image are considered when constructing sequential features. Two spatial similarity measurements, referred to as pixel-matching and block-matching, respectively, are employed to extract pixels that are “similar” to the target pixel. Then, the sequential feature of the target pixel is constructed by exploiting several of the most “similar” pixels and ordering them based on their similarities to the target pixel. The aforementioned two schemes are advantageous, as unlabelled pixels within the given HSI are taken into consideration for similarity measurement and sequential feature construction for the RNN model. Moreover, the block-matching scheme also takes advantage of spatial contextual information, which has been widely utilized in spatial-spectral-based HSI classification methods. To evaluate the proposed methods, two benchmark HSIs are used, including a HSI collected over Pavia University, Italy by the airborne Reflective Optics System Imaging Spectrometer (ROSIS) sensor, and an image acquired over the Salinas Valley, California, USA via the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) sensor. Spatio-temporally coincident ground-reference data accompanies each of these respective HSIs. In addition, the proposed methods are compared with three state-of-the-art algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), the 1-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN), and the 1-dimensional RNN (1DRNN).Experimental results indicate that our proposed methods achieve markedly better classification performance compared with the baseline algorithms on both datasets. For example, for the Pavia University image, the block-matching based RNN achieves the highest overall classification accuracy, with 94.32% accuracy, which is 9.87% higher than the next most accurate algorithm of the aforementioned three baseline methods, which in this case is the 1DCNN, with 84.45% overall accuracy. More specifically, the block-matching method performs better than the pixel-matching method in terms of both quantitative and qualitative assessments. Based on visual assessment/interpretation of the classification maps, it is apparent that “salt-and-pepper” noise is markedly alleviated; with block-matching, smoother classified images are generated compared with pixel-matching-based methods and the three baseline algorithms. Such results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing spatial contextual information in the similarity measurement.

Recurrent neural networks, especially the convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM), have attracted plenty of attention and shown promising results due to their ability in modeling long-term dependencies in many research fields. In this paper, a lightweight tensor attention-driven ConvLSTM neural network (TACLNN) is proposed for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Firstly, to reduce the trainable parameters and memory requirements of ConvLSTM (specifically, the 2-D version of LSTM, i.e., ConvLSTM2D), a lightweight ConvLSTM2D cell is developed by utilizing tensor-train decomposition, resulting in a TT-ConvLSTM2D cell, with which a spatial-spectral TT-ConvLSTM 2-D neural network (SSTTCL2DNN) is built. However, it is inevitable for SSTTCL2DNN to obtain lower accuracies for HSI classification. To recover the accuracy loss caused by the TT-ConvLSTM2D cell in SSTTCL2DNN, a learnable tensor attention residual block (TARB) module is built to further enhance its geometrical structure. When applied to three widely used HSI benchmarks, the proposed TACLNN model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for HSI classification. In addition, the proposed TACLNN can effectively reduce the number of parameters and storage requirements achieving higher classification accuracies as compared to other competitive baselines.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification via sequence modeling. However, most of the RNN methods focus on modeling long-range dependencies along the spectral direction, without fully exploring multi-directional dependencies in the joint spectral-spatial domain. To tackle this issue, we propose MSLAN, a two-branch multi-directional spectral-spatial long short-term memory (LSTM) attention network, for HSI classification. In particular, we employ LSTMs to extract six-directional spatial-spectral features which simultaneously capture the spectral-spatial dependencies along different directions. We then design an attention-based feature fuse module to integrate these directional features, followed by a fully connected layer with cross-entropy loss for classification. Additionally, we incorporate an auxiliary branch into our model to enhance the generalization capability. In this branch, random spatial shuffle and a cosine loss are explored for feature consistency learning by taking into account the varying spatial distributions. The resulting two branch networks, sharing the same network structure and weights, are incorporated into a unified deep learning architecture for training. Experiments show the superiority of MSLAN to the state-of-the-art methods for HSI classification with limited training samples.

Recently, hybrid networks, combining graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into a unified framework, have garnered significant attention in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, existing hybrid networks have the following limitations: 1) Existing methods primarily utilize simple fusion strategies such as concatenation or direct addition, resulting in the ineffective utilization of advantageous features. 2) Traditional GCNs only consider the relationship between pairs of vertices, limiting their ability to capture complex high-order and long-range correlations. In this work, a novel differential feature fusion network (DF2Net) is proposed for HSI classification. Specifically, DF2Net utilizes two subnetworks to learn features at different abstraction levels: the spectral-spatial hypergraph convolutional network (S2HGCN) for capturing complex high-order and long-range correlations, and the spectral-spatial convolution network (S2CN) for pixel-level local information extraction. Subsequently, we introduce an advantageous feature differential enhancement fusion (AFDEF) module, in which mutual enhancement of advantageous features from different network structures is performed, thereby improving the classification robustness of different regions in HSI. The experiments on four HSI benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DF2Net exhibits superior advantages over state-of-the-art models, particularly when the training samples are limited.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently exhibited an excellent performance in hyperspectral image classification tasks. However, the straightforward CNN-based network architecture still finds obstacles when effectively exploiting the relationships between hyperspectral imaging (HSI) features in the spectral-spatial domain, which is a key factor to deal with the high level of complexity present in remotely sensed HSI data. Despite the fact that deeper architectures try to mitigate these limitations, they also find challenges with the convergence of the network parameters, which eventually limit the classification performance under highly demanding scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new CNN architecture based on spectral-spatial capsule networks in order to achieve a highly accurate classification of HSIs while significantly reducing the network design complexity. Specifically, based on Hinton's capsule networks, we develop a CNN model extension that redefines the concept of capsule units to become spectral-spatial units specialized in classifying remotely sensed HSI data. The proposed model is composed by several building blocks, called spectral-spatial capsules, which are able to learn HSI spectral-spatial features considering their corresponding spatial positions in the scene, their associated spectral signatures, and also their possible transformations. Our experiments, conducted using five well-known HSI data sets and several state-of-the-art classification methods, reveal that our HSI classification approach based on spectral-spatial capsules is able to provide competitive advantages in terms of both classification accuracy and computational time.