Modifications of the Multi-Layer Perceptron for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Recently, many convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been proposed to tackle the classification task of hyperspectral images (HSI). In fact, CNN has become the de-facto standard for HSI classification. It seems that the traditional neural networks such as multi-layer perceptron (MLP) are not competitive for HSI classification. However, in this study, we try to prove that the MLP can achieve good classification performance of HSI if it is properly designed and improved. The proposed Modified-MLP for HSI classification contains two special parts: spectral–spatial feature mapping and spectral–spatial information mixing. Specifically, for spectral–spatial feature mapping, each input sample of HSI is divided into a sequence of 3D patches with fixed length and then a linear layer is used to map the 3D patches to spectral–spatial features. For spectral–spatial information mixing, all the spectral–spatial features within a single sample are feed into the solely MLP architecture to model the spectral–spatial information across patches for following HSI classification. Furthermore, to obtain the abundant spectral–spatial information with different scales, Multiscale-MLP is proposed to aggregate neighboring patches with multiscale shapes for acquiring abundant spectral–spatial information. In addition, the Soft-MLP is proposed to further enhance the classification performance by applying soft split operation, which flexibly capture the global relations of patches at different positions in the input HSI sample. Finally, label smoothing is introduced to mitigate the overfitting problem in the Soft-MLP (Soft-MLP-L), which greatly improves the classification performance of MLP-based method. The proposed Modified-MLP, Multiscale-MLP, Soft-MLP, and Soft-MLP-L are tested on the three widely used hyperspectral datasets. The proposed Soft-MLP-L leads to the highest OA, which outperforms CNN by 5.76%, 2.55%, and 2.5% on the Salinas, Pavia, and Indian Pines datasets, respectively. The obtained results reveal that the proposed models provide competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods, which shows that the MLP-based methods are still competitive for HSI classification.