Hybrid dense network with dual attention for hyperspectral image classification

Abstract

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have been widely used in many fields of application, but it is still extremely challenging to obtain higher classification accuracy, especially when facing a smaller number of training samples in practical applications. It is very time-consuming and labori-ous to acquire enough labeled samples. Consequently, an efficient hybrid dense network was proposed based on a dual-attention mechanism, due to limited training samples and unsatisfactory classification accuracy. The stacked autoencoder was first used to reduce the dimensions of HSIs. A hybrid dense network framework with two feature-extraction branches was then established in order to extract abundant spectral–spatial features from HSIs, based on the 3D and 2D convolutional neural network models. In addition, spatial attention and channel attention were jointly introduced in order to achieve selective learning of features derived from HSIs. The feature maps were further refined, and more important features could be retained. To improve computational efficiency and prevent the overfitting, the batch normalization layer and the dropout layer were adopted. The Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas datasets were selected to evaluate the classification performance; 5%, 1%, and 1% of classes were randomly selected as training samples, respectively. In comparison with the REF-SVM, 3D-CNN, HybridSN, SSRN, and R-HybridSN, the overall accuracy of our proposed method could still reach 96.80%, 98.28%, and 98.85%, respectively. Our results show that this method can achieve a satisfactory classification performance even in the case of fewer training samples.