Deep&Dense Convolutional Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as a relevant tool for the classification of remotely sensed hyperspectral images (HSIs), with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) being the current state-of-the-art in many classification tasks. However, deep CNNs present several limitations in the context of HSI supervised classification. Although deep models are able to extract better and more abstract features, the number of parameters that must be fine-tuned requires a large amount of training data (using small learning rates) in order to avoid the overfitting and vanishing gradient problems. The acquisition of labeled data is expensive and time-consuming, and small learning rates forces the gradient descent to use many small steps to converge, slowing down the runtime of the model. To mitigate these issues, this paper introduces a new deep CNN framework for spectral-spatial classification of HSIs. Our newly proposed framework introduces shortcut connections between layers, in which the feature maps of inferior layers are used as inputs of the current layer, feeding its own output to the rest of the the upper layers. This leads to the combination of various spectral-spatial features across layers that allows us to enhance the generalization ability of the network with HSIs. Our experimental results with four well-known HSI datasets reveal that the proposed deep&dense CNN model is able to provide competitive advantages in terms of classification accuracy when compared to other state-of-the-methods for HSI classification.