Hyperspectral Image Classification Method Based on 2D–3D CNN and Multibranch Feature Fusion

The emergence of a convolutional neural network (CNN) has greatly promoted the development of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification technology. However, the acquisition of HSI is difficult. The lack of training samples is the primary cause of low classification performance. The traditional CNN-based methods mainly use the 2-D CNN for feature extraction, which makes the interband correlations of HSIs underutilized. The 3-D CNN extracts the joint spectral–spatial information representation, but it depends on a more complex model. Also, too deep or too shallow network cannot extract the image features well. To tackle these issues, we propose an HSI classification method based on the 2D–3D CNN and multibranch feature fusion. We first combine 2-D CNN and 3-D CNN to extract image features. Then, by means of the multibranch neural network, three kinds of features from shallow to deep are extracted and fused in the spectral dimension. Finally, the fused features are passed into several fully connected layers and a softmax layer to obtain the classification results. In addition, our network model utilizes the state-of-the-art activation function Mish to further improve the classification performance. Our experimental results, conducted on four widely used HSI datasets, indicate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the existing alternatives.