Fusing Spatial Attention with Spectral-Channel Attention Mechanism for Hyperspectral Image Classification via Encoder–Decoder Networks

Abstract

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, feature extraction on hyperspectral data still faces numerous challenges. Existing methods cannot extract spatial and spectral-channel contextual information in a targeted manner. In this paper, we propose an encoder–decoder network that fuses spatial attention and spectral-channel attention for HSI classification from three public HSI datasets to tackle these issues. In terms of feature information fusion, a multi-source attention mechanism including spatial and spectral-channel attention is proposed to encode the spatial and spectral multi-channels contextual information. Moreover, three fusion strategies are proposed to effectively utilize spatial and spectral-channel attention. They are direct aggregation, aggregation on feature space, and Hadamard product. In terms of network development, an encoder–decoder framework is employed for hyperspectral image classification. The encoder is a hierarchical transformer pipeline that can extract long-range context information. Both shallow local features and rich global semantic information are encoded through hierarchical feature expressions. The decoder consists of suitable upsampling, skip connection, and convolution blocks, which fuse multi-scale features efficiently. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our approach has greater performance in hyperspectral image classification.