Cnn-assisted multi-hop graph attention network for hyperspectral image classification

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recently, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has gained widespread adoption in the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification owing to its remarkable feature extraction capability. However, the fixed acceptance domain of CNN restricts it to Euclidean image data only, making it difficult to capture complex information in hyperspectral data. To overcome this problem, much attention has been paid to the graph attention network (GAT), which can effectively model graph structure and capture complex dependencies between nodes. However, GAT usually acts on superpixel nodes, which may lead to the loss of pixel-level information. To better integrate the advantages of both, we propose a CNN-assisted multi-hop graph attention network (CMGAT) for HSI classification. Specifically, a parallel dual-branch architecture is first constructed to simultaneously capture spectral-spatial features from hyperspectral data at the superpixel and pixel levels using GAT and CNN, respectively. On this basis, the multi-hop and multi-scale mechanisms are further employed to construct a multi-hop GAT module and a multi-scale CNN module to capture diverse feature information. Secondly, an attention module is cascaded before the multi-scale CNN module to improve classification performance. Eventually, the output information from the two branches is weighted and fused to produce the classification result. We performed experiments on four benchmark HSI datasets, including Indian Pines (IP), University of Pavia (UP), Salinas Valley (SV) and WHU-Hi-LongKou (LK). The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several deep learning methods, achieving overall accuracies of 95.67%, 99.04%, 99.55% and 99.51%, respectively, even with fewer training samples.