Most of the existing spatial-spectral-based hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) methods mainly extract the spatial-spectral information by combining the pixels in a small neighborhood or aggregating the statistical and morphological characteristics. However, those strategies can only generate shallow appearance features with limited representative ability for classes with high interclass similarity and spatial diversity and therefore reduce the classification accuracy. To this end, we present a novel HSIC framework, named deep multiscale spatial-spectral feature extraction algorithm, which focuses on learning effective discriminant features for HSIC. First, the well pretrained deep fully convolutional network based on VGG-verydeep-16 is introduced to excavate the potential deep multiscale spatial structural information in the proposed hyperspectral imaging framework. Then, the spectral feature and the deep multiscale spatial feature are fused by adopting the weighted fusion method. Finally, the fusion feature is put into a generic classifier to obtain the pixelwise classification. Compared with the existing spectral-spatial-based classification techniques, the proposed method provides the state-of-the-art performance and is much more effective, especially for images with high nonlinear distribution and spatial diversity.

Supervised machine learning and deep learning methods perform well in hyperspectral image classification. However, hyperspectral images have few labeled samples, which make them difficult to be trained because supervised classification methods rely heavily on sample quantity and quality. Inspired by the idea of self-supervised learning, this article proposes a hyperspectral imagery classification algorithm based on contrast learning, which uses the information of abundant unlabeled samples to alleviate the problem of insufficient label information in hyperspectral data. The algorithm uses a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, the model is pretrained in the way of self-supervised learning, using a large number of unlabeled samples combined with data enhancement to construct positive and negative sample pairs, and contrastive learning (CL) is carried out. The purpose is to enable the model to make judgments on positive and negative samples. In the second stage, based on the pretrained model, the features of the hyperspectral image are extracted for classification, and a small amount of labeled samples are used to fine-tune the features. Experiments show that the features extracted by self-supervised learning achieved improved results on downstream classification task.

Classifying hyperspectral images (HSIs) with limited samples is a challenging issue. The generative adversarial network (GAN) is a promising technique to mitigate the small sample size problem. GAN can generate samples by the competition between a generator and a discriminator. However, it is difficult to generate high-quality samples for HSIs with complex spatial–spectral distribution, which may further degrade the performance of the discriminator. To address this problem, a symmetric convolutional GAN based on collaborative learning and attention mechanism (CA-GAN) is proposed. In CA-GAN, the generator and the discriminator not only compete but also collaborate. The shallow to deep features of real multiclass samples in the discriminator assist the sample generation in the generator. In the generator, a joint spatial–spectral hard attention module is devised by defining a dynamic activation function based on a multi-branch convolutional network. It impels the distribution of generated samples to approximate the distribution of real HSIs both in spectral and spatial dimensions, and it discards misleading and confounding information. In the discriminator, a convolutional LSTM layer is merged to extract spatial contextual features and capture long-term spectral dependencies simultaneously. Finally, the classification performance of the discriminator is improved by enforcing competitive and collaborative learning between the discriminator and generator. Experiments on HSI datasets show that CA-GAN obtains satisfactory classification results compared with advanced methods, especially when the number of training samples is limited.

Band selection has been widely utilized in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification to reduce the dimensionality of HSIs. Recently, deep-learning-based band selection has become of great interest. However, existing deep-learning-based methods usually implement band selection and classification in isolation, or evaluate selected spectral bands by training the deep network repeatedly, which may lead to the loss of discriminative bands and increased computational cost. In this article, a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based on bandwise-independent convolution and hard thresholding (BHCNN) is proposed, which combines band selection, feature extraction, and classification into an end-to-end trainable network. In BHCNN, a band selection layer is constructed by designing bandwise 1x 1 convolutions, which perform for each spectral band of input HSIs independently. Then, hard thresholding is utilized to constrain the weights of convolution kernels with unselected spectral bands to zero. In this case, these weights are difficult to update. To optimize these weights, the straight-through estimator (STE) is devised by approximating the gradient. Furthermore, a novel coarse-to-fine loss calculated by full and selected spectral bands is defined to improve the interpretability of STE. In the subsequent layers of BHCNN, multiscale 3-D dilated convolutions are constructed to extract joint spatial-spectral features from HSIs with selected spectral bands. The experimental results on several HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method uses selected spectral bands to achieve more encouraging classification performance than current state-of-the-art band selection methods.