Spatial Sequential Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In hyperspectral image processing, classification is one of the most popular research topics. In recent years, research progress made in deep-learning-based hierarchical feature extraction and classification has shown a great power in many applications. In this paper, we propose a novel local spatial sequential (LSS) method, which is used in a recurrent neural network (RNN). Using this model, we can extract local and semantic information for hyperspectral image classification. First, we extract low-level features from hyperspectral images, including texture and differential morphological profiles. Second, we combine the low-level features together and propose a method to construct the LSS features. Afterwards, we build an RNN and use the LSS features as the input to train the network for optimizing the system parameters. Finally, the high-level semantic features generated by the RNN is fed into a softmax layer for the final classification. In addition, a nonlocal spatial sequential method is presented for the recurrent neural network model (NLSS-RNN) to further enhance the classification performance. NLSS-RNN finds nonlocal similar structures to a given pixel and extracts corresponding LSS features, which not only preserve the local spatial information, but also integrate the information of nonlocal similar samples. The experimental results on three publicly accessible datasets show that our proposed method can obtain competitive performance compared with several state-of-the-art classifiers.