Dynamic Wide and Deep Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Recently, deep learning has been successfully and widely used in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Considering the difficulty of acquiring HSIs, there are usually a small number of pixels used as the training instances. Therefore, it is hard to fully use the advantages of deep learning networks; for example, the very deep layers with a large number of parameters lead to overfitting. This paper proposed a dynamic wide and deep neural network (DWDNN) for HSI classification, which includes multiple efficient wide sliding window and subsampling (EWSWS) networks and can grow dynamically according to the complexity of the problems. The EWSWS network in the DWDNN was designed both in the wide and deep direction with transform kernels as hidden units. These multiple layers of kernels can extract features from the low to high level, and because they are extended in the wide direction, they can learn features more steadily and smoothly. The sliding windows with the stride and subsampling were designed to reduce the dimension of the features for each layer; therefore, the computational load was reduced. Finally, all the weights were only from the fully connected layer, and the iterative least squares method was used to compute them easily. The proposed DWDNN was tested with several HSI data including the Botswana, Pavia University, and Salinas remote sensing datasets with different numbers of instances (from small to big). The experimental results showed that the proposed method had the highest test accuracies compared to both the typical machine learning methods such as support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), and the recently proposed deep learning methods including the 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) and the 3D CNN designed for HSI classification.