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In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been widely used for remote sensing (RS) scene classification tasks and have achieved excellent results. However, CNNs are not good at exploring contextual information, which is essential for fully understanding RS scenes. A new model named transformer attracts researchers’ attention to address this problem, which is skilled in mining the latent contextual information in RS scenes. Nevertheless, since the contents of RS scenes are diverse in type and various in scale, the performance of the original transformer in RS scene classification cannot reach what we expect. In addition, due to the specific self-attention mechanism, the time costs of the transformer are high, which hinders its practicability in the RS community. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a new model named efficient multiscale transformer and cross-level attention learning (EMTCAL) for RS scene classification in this article. EMTCAL combines the advantages of CNN and transformer to mine information within RS scenes fully. First, it uses a multilayer feature extraction module (MFEM) to acquire global visual features and multilevel convolutional features from RS scenes. Second, a contextual information extraction module (CIEM) is proposed to capture rich contextual information from multilevel features. In CIEM, taking the characteristics of RS scenes and the computational complexity into account, we propose an efficient multiscale transformer (EMST). EMST can mine the abundant knowledge with various scales hidden in RS scenes and model their inherent relations at small time costs. Third, a cross-level attention module (CLAM) is developed to aggregate and explore correlations of multilevel features. Finally, a class score fusion module (CSFM) is designed to integrate the contributions of global and aggregated multilevel features for discriminative scene representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public RS scene datasets. The positive results demonstrate that our EMTCAL can achieve superior classification performance and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our source codes are available in https://github.com/TangXu-Group/Remote-Sensing-Images-Classification/tree/main/EMTCAL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) have been applied in a variety of fields due to their powerful ability in processing graph-like data. However, the massive number of hyperspectral pixels makes it challenging to define general graph structures on hyperspectral images (HSIs). On the other hand, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) take in regular image regions with fixed square size, and have demonstrated impressive accuracy while being efficient in computation. Inspired by the classification framework of CNNs, we develop a GCN-based model that generates effective local spectral–spatial features for HSI classification. Specifically, graph convolutions are performed separately on every local region, which significantly limits the graph’s size. While graph convolution extracts features of every pixel, it does not reduce the number of them. To fuse suitable representations for the classification task, we develop a graph pooling operation to preserve classification-specific features and reduce redundant pixels. Based on local regions of HSIs, pooling in the graph domain is equivalent to spatial pooling in the spatial domain. The proposed method is thus named the spatial pooling graph convolutional network (SPGCN). Experimental results on several typical datasets demonstrated that the proposed SPGCN provides competitive results compared with other state-of-the-art CNN-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is one of the most important tasks in hyperspectral data analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been introduced to HSI classification and achieved good performance. In this article, an effective and efficient CNN-based spectral partitioning residual network (SPRN) is proposed for HSI classification. The SPRN splits the input spectral bands into several nonoverlapping continuous subbands and uses cascaded parallel improved residual blocks to extract spectral–spatial features from these subbands, respectively. Finally, the features are fused and fed into a classifier. By equivalently using grouped convolutions, the spectral partition and feature extraction are embedded into an end-to-end network. Experimental results show that the proposed SPRN achieves state-of-the-art performance, meanwhile, with relatively fewer parameters and computational costs. Usually, the CNN takes a patch that contains continuous spatial information as the input and results in a class label of the center pixel. The large size of the input patch includes more spatial information, whereas also introduces interfering pixels that may lead to a degradation of classification accuracies. For that reason, we propose a novel spatial attention module named homogeneous pixel detection module (HPDM). The module alleviates the degradation of performance as the input patch size increases by capturing the homogeneous pixels in the input patch. The module can be integrated into any CNN-based HSI classification framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]