Central to the looming paradigm shift toward data-intensive science, machine-learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, deep learning has proven to be both a major breakthrough and an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to everything? Or should we resist a black-box solution? These are controversial issues within the remote-sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote-sensing data analysis, review recent advances, and provide resources we hope will make deep learning in remote sensing seem ridiculously simple. More importantly, we encourage remote-sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented, large-scale, influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.

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Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Review and List of Resources

In this paper, we designed an end-to-end spectral–spatial residual network (SSRN) that takes raw 3-D cubes as input data without feature engineering for hyperspectral image classification. In this network, the spectral and spatial residual blocks consecutively learn discriminative features from abundant spectral signatures and spatial contexts in hyperspectral imagery (HSI). The proposed SSRN is a supervised deep learning framework that alleviates the declining-accuracy phenomenon of other deep learning models. Specifically, the residual blocks connect every other 3-D convolutional layer through identity mapping, which facilitates the backpropagation of gradients. Furthermore, we impose batch normalization on every convolutional layer to regularize the learning process and improve the classification performance of trained models. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that the SSRN achieved the state-of-the-art HSI classification accuracy in agricultural, rural–urban, and urban data sets: Indian Pines, Kennedy Space Center, and University of Pavia.

Spectral–Spatial Residual Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification: A 3-D Deep Learning Framework

Recent research has shown that using spectral–spatial information can considerably improve the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. HSI data is typically presented in the format of 3D cubes. Thus, 3D spatial filtering naturally offers a simple and effective method for simultaneously extracting the spectral–spatial features within such images. In this paper, a 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) framework is proposed for accurate HSI classification. The proposed method views the HSI cube data altogether without relying on any preprocessing or post-processing, extracting the deep spectral–spatial-combined features effectively. In addition, it requires fewer parameters than other deep learning-based methods. Thus, the model is lighter, less likely to over-fit, and easier to train. For comparison and validation, we test the proposed method along with three other deep learning-based HSI classification methods—namely, stacked autoencoder (SAE), deep brief network (DBN), and 2D-CNN-based methods—on three real-world HSI datasets captured by different sensors. Experimental results demonstrate that our 3D-CNN-based method outperforms these state-of-the-art methods and sets a new record.

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Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral imagery with 3D convolutional neural network

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is widely used for the analysis of remotely sensed images. Hyperspectral imagery includes varying bands of images. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the most frequently used deep learning-based methods for visual data processing. The use of CNN for HSI classification is also visible in recent works. These approaches are mostly based on 2-D CNN. On the other hand, the HSI classification performance is highly dependent on both spatial and spectral information. Very few methods have used the 3-D-CNN because of increased computational complexity. This letter proposes a hybrid spectral CNN (HybridSN) for HSI classification. In general, the HybridSN is a spectral–spatial 3-D-CNN followed by spatial 2-D-CNN. The 3-D-CNN facilitates the joint spatial–spectral feature representation from a stack of spectral bands. The 2-D-CNN on top of the 3-D-CNN further learns more abstract-level spatial representation. Moreover, the use of hybrid CNNs reduces the complexity of the model compared to the use of 3-D-CNN alone. To test the performance of this hybrid approach, very rigorous HSI classification experiments are performed over Indian Pines, University of Pavia, and Salinas Scene remote sensing data sets. The results are compared with the state-of-the-art hand-crafted as well as end-to-end deep learning-based methods. A very satisfactory performance is obtained using the proposed HybridSN for HSI classification. The source code can be found at https://github.com/gokriznastic/HybridSN .

HybridSN: Exploring 3-D–2-D CNN Feature Hierarchy for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has become a hot topic in the field of remote sensing. In general, the complex characteristics of hyperspectral data make the accurate classification of such data challenging for traditional machine learning methods. In addition, hyperspectral imaging often deals with an inherently nonlinear relation between the captured spectral information and the corresponding materials. In recent years, deep learning has been recognized as a powerful feature-extraction tool to effectively address nonlinear problems and widely used in a number of image processing tasks. Motivated by those successful applications, deep learning has also been introduced to classify HSIs and demonstrated good performance. This survey paper presents a systematic review of deep learning-based HSI classification literatures and compares several strategies for this topic. Specifically, we first summarize the main challenges of HSI classification which cannot be effectively overcome by traditional machine learning methods, and also introduce the advantages of deep learning to handle these problems. Then, we build a framework which divides the corresponding works into spectral-feature networks, spatial-feature networks, and spectral-spatial-feature networks to systematically review the recent achievements in deep learning-based HSI classification. In addition, considering the fact that available training samples in the remote sensing field are usually very limited and training deep networks require a large number of samples, we include some strategies to improve classification performance, which can provide some guidelines for future studies on this topic. Finally, several representative deep learning-based classification methods are conducted on real HSIs in our experiments.

Deep Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification: An Overview

Due to the advantages of deep learning, in this paper, a regularized deep feature extraction (FE) method is presented for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed approach employs several convolutional and pooling layers to extract deep features from HSIs, which are nonlinear, discriminant, and invariant. These features are useful for image classification and target detection. Furthermore, in order to address the common issue of imbalance between high dimensionality and limited availability of training samples for the classification of HSI, a few strategies such as L2 regularization and dropout are investigated to avoid overfitting in class data modeling. More importantly, we propose a 3-D CNN-based FE model with combined regularization to extract effective spectral-spatial features of hyperspectral imagery. Finally, in order to further improve the performance, a virtual sample enhanced method is proposed. The proposed approaches are carried out on three widely used hyperspectral data sets: Indian Pines, University of Pavia, and Kennedy Space Center. The obtained results reveal that the proposed models with sparse constraints provide competitive results to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the proposed deep FE opens a new window for further research.

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Hanlu Jiang

Papers

Deep Feature Extraction and Classification of Hyperspectral Images Based on Convolutional Neural Networks