Feedback Attention-Based Dense CNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) methods based on convolutional neural network (CNN) continue to progress in recent years. However, high complexity, information redundancy, and inefficient description still are the main barriers to the current HSIC networks. To address the mentioned problems, we present a spatial-spectral dense CNN framework with a feedback attention mechanism called FADCNN for HSIC in this article. The proposed architecture assembles the spectral-spatial feature in a compact connection style to extract sufficient information independently with two separate dense CNN networks. Specifically, the feedback attention modules are developed for the first time to enhance the attention map with the semantic knowledge from the high-level layer of the dense model, and we strengthen the spatial attention module by considering multiscale spatial information. To further improve the computation efficiency and the discrimination of the feature representation, the band attention module is designed to emphasize the weight of the bands that participated in the classification training. Besides, the spatial-spectral features are integrated and mined intensely for better refinement in the feature mining network. The extensive experimental results on real hyperspectral images (HSI) demonstrate that the proposed FADCNN architecture has significant advantages compared with other state-of-the-art methods.