Hierarchical Shrinkage Multiscale Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification with Hierarchical Feature Fusion

Abstract

Recently, deep learning (DL)-based hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) has attracted substantial attention. Many works based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) model have been certificated to be significantly successful for boosting the performance of HSIC. However, most of these methods extract features by using a fixed convolutional kernel and ignore multiscale features of the ground objects of hyperspectral images (HSIs). Although some recent methods have proposed multiscale feature extraction schemes, more computing and storage resources were consumed. Moreover, when using CNN to implement HSI classification, many methods only use the high-level semantic information extracted from the end of the network, ignoring the edge information extracted from shallow layers of the network. To settle the preceding two issues, a novel HSIC method based on hierarchical shrinkage multiscale network and the hierarchical feature fusion is proposed, with which the newly proposed classification framework can fuse features generated by both of multiscale receptive field and multiple levels. Specifically, multidepth and multiscale residual block (MDMSRB) is constructed by superposition dilated convolution to realize multiscale feature extraction. Furthermore, according to the change of feature size in different stages of the neural networks, we design a hierarchical shrinkage multiscale feature extraction network by pruning MDMSRB to reduce the redundancy of network structure. In addition, to make full use of the features extracted in each stage of the network, the proposed network hierarchically integrates low-level edge features and high-level semantic features effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more competitive performance with a limited computational cost than other state-of-the-art methods.