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

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 2D CNN. Whereas, the HSI classification performance is highly dependent on both spatial and spectral information. Very few methods have utilized the 3D CNN because of increased computational complexity. This letter proposes a Hybrid Spectral Convolutional Neural Network (HybridSN) for HSI classification. Basically, the HybridSN is a spectral-spatial 3D-CNN followed by spatial 2D-CNN. The 3D-CNN facilitates the joint spatial-spectral feature representation from a stack of spectral bands. The 2D-CNN on top of the 3D-CNN further learns more abstract level spatial representation. Moreover, the use of hybrid CNNs reduces the complexity of the model compared to 3D-CNN alone. To test the performance of this hybrid approach, very rigorous HSI classification experiments are performed over Indian Pines, Pavia University and Salinas Scene remote sensing datasets. 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 \url{https://github.com/gokriznastic/HybridSN}.