Object-oriented multiscale deep features for hyperspectral image classification

Abstract

ABSTRACT The classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs) is one of the most popular topics in the remote sensing community. Numerous feature extraction methods have been proposed to improve the classification accuracy of HSIs. Recently, deep features extracted by convolution neural network (CNN) have been introduced into the classification process of HSIs. Due to the nonlinear and invariant advantages of the features, CNN methods provide a powerful tool for representing geographic objects and classifying HSIs. However, traditional deep features only extracted at pixel-level and often neglect multiscale characteristics of geographic objects. In this study, a new deep feature extraction method is proposed, which takes advantage of multi-scale object analysis and the CNN model. Firstly, multiscale image objects are obtained by the multiscale segmentation algorithm and multiscale low-level features of objects are extracted. Secondly, the CNN is devoted to obtain deep features from low-level object features at each scale, respectively. Thirdly, the obtained deep features at all scales are stacked and fed to one fully connected layer to extract the multiscale deep learning features for classification. Finally, the logistic regression classifier is applied to hyperspectral image (HSI) classification based on object-oriented multiscale deep features. The proposed method was carried out on three widely used hyperspectral data sets: University of Pavia, Salinas, and Washington DC. The results reveal that the proposed method provides better results than other state-of-the-art methods.