DCNR: deep cube CNN with random forest for hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification is one of the fundamental tasks in the field of remote sensing data analysis. CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) has been proven to be an effective deep learning model, which can extract high-level features directly from the raw data and thereby utilize rich information contained in HSI data. However, labor cost to label enough HIS data for training model is usually expensive, so that it is a strong demand of utilizing limited training data to get a satisfied classification accuracy. In this paper, we put forward a deep cube CNN model – DCNR, which is composed of a cube neighbor HSI pixels strategy, a deep CNN and a random forest classifier. In DCNR model, cubic samples, containing spectral-spatial information, are generated by putting each target pixel and its neighbors together. Then features with high representative ability, extracted by applying a specially designed cube CNN model on each cubic sample, are fed into the random forest classifier for the classification of the target pixel. Results show that DCNR model can achieve classification accuracy of 96.78%, 96.08% and 94.85% on KSC, IP and SA datasets respectively with 20% samples as training set, and 85.03%, 83.45 and 62.17% on KSC, IP and SA datasets respectively with only 1% samples as training set, significantly outperforming random forest and cube CNN models.