Learning Hierarchical Spectral–Spatial Features for Hyperspectral Image Classification

This paper proposes a spectral-spatial feature learning (SSFL) method to obtain robust features of hyperspectral images (HSIs). It combines the spectral feature learning and spatial feature learning in a hierarchical fashion. Stacking a set of SSFL units, a deep hierarchical model called the spectral-spatial networks (SSN) is further proposed for HSI classification. SSN can exploit both discriminative spectral and spatial information simultaneously. Specifically, SSN learns useful high-level features by alternating between spectral and spatial feature learning operations. Then, kernel-based extreme learning machine (KELM), a shallow neural network, is embedded in SSN to classify image pixels. Extensive experiments are performed on two benchmark HSI datasets to verify the effectiveness of SSN. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, SSN with a deep hierarchical architecture obtains higher classification accuracy in terms of the overall accuracy, average accuracy, and kappa (κ) coefficient of agreement, especially when the number of the training samples is small.