Hyperspectral classification via learnt features

This paper presents a new hyperspectral image (HSI) classification method which is capable of automatic feature learning while achieving high classification accuracy. The method contains two major modules: the spectral classification module and the spatial constraint module. Spectral classification module uses a deep network named stacked denoising autoencoders (SdA) to learn feature representation of the data. Through SdA, the data are projected nonlinearly from its original hyperspectral space to some higher dimensional space where more compact distribution is obtained. An interesting aspect of this method is that it does not need a feature design/extraction process guided by human prior. The suitable feature for the classification is learned by the deep network itself. Superpixel is utilized to generate the spatial constraints to refine the spectral classification results. By exploiting the spatial consistency of neighborhood pixels, the accuracy of classification is further improved by a big margin. Experiments on the public datasets reveal the superior performance of the proposed method.