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Recently, most convolutional neural network-based methods use convolutional kernels of fixed size to extract features, which ignore the inherent spatial structure information of ground objects and lose spatial details. In addition, rough first-order statistics is not enough to capture subtle differences between different categories and extract nonlocal context information. To address these issues, a hyperspectral image (HSI) classification method based on multiscale cross-branch response and second-order channel attention (MCRSCA) is proposed in this article. First, a multiscale cross-branch response (MCBR) module is proposed, which uses convolution kernels of different sizes for feature extraction. It adds and concatenates the features of different scales, respectively, to obtain rich and complementary spatial context information. Then, element multiplication and element addition are performed on the fused multiscale features to promote the propagation of the multiscale information and enhance the nonlinear expression ability. Next, the second-order channel attention (SOCA) module is designed to interact the channel information through the feature covariance matrix to obtain the long-term dependence between channels. This module pays more attention to the significant channels and suppresses the redundant channels. Finally, the residual connection is used to embed MCBR and SOCA into the residual block to improve the gradient back propagation and accelerate the training process. Experiments on four commonly used HSI benchmark datasets show that the results of MCRSCA are competitive compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning methods have gained rapid development in hyperspectral pansharpening (HP) due to powerful spatial–spectral feature extraction ability. However, most of these methods are optimized using a single reconstruction objective. It is difficult for these methods to find a balance between spectral preservation and spatial preservation. Furthermore, these methods adopt interpolation or convolution to upsample the hyperspectral images (HSIs), which tends to cause noticeable spectral distortion. To conquer these issues, a novel multiobjective guided divide-and-conquer network (MO-DCN) is proposed for HP. It consists of a deconvolution long short-term memories (LSTMs) network (DLSTM) and a divide-and-conquer network (DCN). DLSTM leverages bi-direction learning to upsample HSIs by considering 3-D spatiotemporal dependencies. Then, DCN designs a two-branch architecture to reconstruct spatial and spectral information from upsampled HSIs and panchromatic images (PANIs), respectively, where the spatial branch designs an attention-in-attention module (AIAM) to emphasize complementary attention in a coarse-to-fine way. Finally, co-improvement of spatial and spectral information is formulated as an Epsilon-constraint-based multiobjective optimization. The Epsilon constraint method transforms one objective into a constraint and regards it as a penalty bound to make an excellent tradeoff between different objectives. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method markedly improves pansharpening performance in both the spatial and spectral domains and has superior fusion performance than state-of-the-art methods. [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]

For hyperspectral imagery (HSI) classification, most of the studies focus on how to improve the classification accuracy, while the influence of sampling strategy for classification performance attracts little attention. For now, random sampling (RS) is the most adopted strategy. That is, for a hyperspectral image, a certain number of labeled samples are randomly selected as the training set, and the remaining labeled samples are taken as the test set. However, the RS strategy will produce over optimistic results when used for performance evaluation because of the overlap between training set and test set. Though spectral-spatial classification methods benefit most from the RS strategy, the pixel-wise classification methods can also benefit from it because of the high spectral correlation between training and test samples. However, in practical applications, the RS strategy is not feasible. Because the training and test samples are often collected from different locations. In this situation, the correlation between training and test samples will decrease dramatically and the performance of HSI classification methods will be affected. In this article, a nonoverlapped sampling method is adopted to reduce the correlation between training and test samples and different classic classification methods are evaluated. Experimental results show that the classification performance of all methods drops a lot when nonoverlapped sampling strategy is adopted. After the analysis of some important factors for HSI classification, we also propose a cotraining-based classification method to relief the influence of sampling strategy and obtains much better performance compared with those classic spectral-spatial classification 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]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used in the field of modern remote sensing due to its high resolution for a comparatively small antenna. However, there are still some difficulties in the processing of SAR images. In particular, accurate segmentation of small targets and image corners remains an important challenge, as these can easily be lost during conventional image smoothing and denoising methods. To address this, we propose an SAR image segmentation algorithm based on constrained smoothing and hierarchical label correction (CSHLC). First, a Canny algorithm is used to extract the edges of SAR images, and the Gaussian smoothing is performed on SAR images under edge constraints to achieve noise reduction so that the edges of small and big targets are well preserved. Second, a preliminary K-means clustering is conducted on the smoothing results, and then, a Markov random field (MRF) model is used on the clustering results (“original label” results), iteratively calculating a maximum likelihood set of pixel labels. Finally, through two label correction methods, pixel group counting comparison (PGCC) and gray similarity comparison (GSC), the labels of the MRF output are further checked and corrected to obtain final segmentation results. Compared with seven state-of-the-art algorithms, simulation results on both simulated SAR images and real SAR images show that the proposed CSHLC delivers higher accuracy while better retaining corners and small targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Band selection is an effective means to alleviate the curse of dimensionality in hyperspectral data. Many methods select a compact and low redundant band subset, which is inadequate as it may degrade the classification performance. Instead, more emphasis shall be put on selecting representative bands. In this article, we propose a robust unsupervised band selection method to address this issue. Our method reveals bandwise representativeness based on the comprehensive interband neighborhood structure. It incorporates an interband neighborhood graph into a sparse self-contained regression model in order to provide a reasonable measure for bandwise representativeness. The derived coefficient matrix not only uncovers bandwise importance values but also is coherent to the generalized interband local neighborhood structure. For constructing the interband neighboring structural graph, an integrated multigraph model is employed to achieve better generalization performance. It combines the benefit of multiple graphs but is insusceptible to the defects of a single one. To enhance the reliability of this model, a joint trace minimum and nonnegative constraint is imposed on the coefficient matrix. Accordingly, a multigraph integrated embedding and robust self-contained regression model (MGRSR) is formulated. In addition, an iterative update algorithm is developed to solve the problem. Comparative experiments on three hyperspectral data sets illustrate that MGRSR is robust to various data and has superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demo- nstrated outstanding performance on image classification. To classify the hyperspectral images (HSIs), existing CNN-based approaches commonly adopt the architecture using single or several fixed spatial windows as inputs. This kind of architecture may lose contextual information or incorporate heterogeneous information due to the neglect of various land-cover distributions in HSIs. To deal with this problem, a novel attention multibranch CNN method based on adaptive region search (RS-AMCNN) is proposed for HSI classification. In RS-AMCNN, sizes and locations of spatial windows are searched in the nonlocal candidate region adaptively according to sample-specific distribution. These flexible spatial windows are input into several branches of RS-AMCNN. In each branch, convolutional long short-term memories (ConvLSTMs) are merged into CNN from shallow to deep layers, which not only extracts joint spatial–spectral features, but also exploits complementary information among different layers. Then, a branch attention mechanism is devised to emphasize more discriminative branches and suppress less useful ones. It forces RS-AMCNN to extract multiscale and multicontextual attention features for classification. Finally, RS-AMCNN is optimized end-to-end by combining the losses from the ramose classifiers of different branches and the main classifier. Experiments carried on several benchmark HSI data sets demonstrate that RS-AMCNN provides promising classification performance, especially in edge preservation and region uniformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pan sharpening is used to fuse a low-resolution multispectral (MS) image and a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image to obtain a high-resolution MS image. This article proposes PSMD-Net, an end-to-end pan-sharpening method based on a multi-scale dense network. A shallow feature extraction layer (SFEL) extracts the shallow features from the original images, and these are used as an input to a global dense feature fusion (GDFF) network to learn the global features for image reconstruction. A multiscale dense block (MDB) is designed to fully extract the spatial and spectral information from the shallow features in the GDFF network. In the proposed network, multiple MDBs are stacked to extract rich, multi-scale dense hierarchical features, and a global dense connection (GDC) is designed to allow direct connections from the state of the current MDB to all subsequent MDBs to extract more advanced features. The extracted hierarchical features are sent to the global feature fusion layer (GFFL) to adaptively learn the global features for image reconstruction. Finally, global residual learning (GRL) is adopted to force the network to pay more attention to the changing part of the image. We perform experiments on simulated and real data from WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 satellites. Visual and quantitative assessment results demonstrate that PSMD-Net yields higher-resolution fusion images than the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral band selection is of great value to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. For many band selection methods, however, the neglect of bandwise usefulness tends to result in the loss of valuable bands, but the retention of useless ones; consequently, this causes deterioration of the classification performance. In this sense, bandwise significance should be emphasized. To address this issue, this article proposes a manifold-preserving and weakly redundant (MPWR) unsupervised band selection method. In the method, a manifold-preserving band-importance metric is put forward to measure the bandwise essentiality. This ensures the retention of bands involving abundant intrinsic structures conductive to classification. Specifically, aimed at obtaining the presented band-importance metric, an attainment algorithm is presented, which mainly relies on the embedding learning and linear regression, followed by the introduction of multi-normalization combination. In addition, concerning the massive redundancy caused by the highly correlated bands, MPWR further establishes a constrained band-weight optimization model. Then, both bandwise manifold-preserving capability and intraband correlation are fully integrated into the band selection process. To solve the problem, a corresponding algorithm within the framework of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is also developed. Regarding evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method, comparative experiments with the state-of-the-art methods are conducted on three public hyperspectral data sets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of MPWR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are famous for generating samples by training a generator and a discriminator via an adversarial procedure. For hyperspectral image classification, the collection of samples is always difficult. However, directly applying GAN to hyperspectral image classification exists two problems. One is that the generated samples lack discriminative information. Meanwhile, the discriminator has no discriminative ability for multiclassification. Another is that spatial and spectral information requires to be considered in hyperspectral image classification simultaneously. To address these problems, a novel multiclass spatial–spectral GAN (MSGAN) method is proposed. In MSGAN, two generators are devised to generate the samples containing spatial and spectral information, respectively, and the discriminator is devised to extract joint spatial–spectral features and output multiclass probabilities. Moreover, novel adversarial objectives for multiclass are defined. The discriminator is devised to predict training samples belonging to true classes and generated samples belonging to all the classes with the same probability. The generators are devised to make the discriminator mistake. By adversarial learning between the discriminator and generators, the classification performance of the discriminator is promoted with the assistance of discriminative generated samples. Experimental results on hyperspectral images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves encouraging classification performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods, especially with the limited training samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hyperspectral images, band selection plays a crucial role for land-cover classification. Multiple kernel learning (MKL) is a popular feature selection method by selecting the relevant features and classifying the images simultaneously. Unfortunately, a large number of spectral bands in hyperspectral images result in excessive kernels, which limit the application of MKL. To address this problem, a novel MKL method based on discriminative kernel clustering (DKC) is proposed. In the proposed method, a discriminative kernel alignment (KA) (DKA) is defined. Traditional KA measures kernel similarity independently of the current classification task. Compared with KA, DKA measures the similarity of discriminative information by introducing the comparison of intraclass and interclass similarities. It can evaluate both kernel redundancy and kernel synergy for classification. Then, DKA-based affinity-propagation clustering is devised to reduce the kernel scale and retain the kernels having high discrimination and low redundancy for classification. Additionally, an analysis of necessity for DKC in hyperspectral band selection is provided by empirical Rademacher complexity. Experimental results on several hyperspectral images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed band selection method in terms of classification performance and computation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]