Hyperspectral Image Classification Based on Multilevel Joint Feature Extraction Network

Abstract

Over the past few years, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been broadly adopted in remote sensing (RS) imagery processing areas due to its impressive capabilities in feature extraction. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge for CNN-based hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods to extract more effective spectral-spatial features considering all spectral bands. Driven by this issue, we propose a novel approach to cope with the HSI classification task, referring to the multilevel joint feature extraction network. The proposed network makes full use of the information on each channel of HSI and transforms it into valid channel-wised spatial features through a designed convolution process. Moreover, these feature maps form global attention details to guide the extraction of spectral-spatial features, which are taken to the next level for further feature mining. Then, the features obtained at different levels are integrated for ground object classification. In contrast with several state-of-the-art HSI classification methods on four public datasets, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and remarkable feature extraction capability of our proposed approach.