Spectral-Spatial Evidential Learning Network for Open-Set Hyperspectral Image Classification

Deep learning-based classification methods of hyperspectral images (HSIs) have made significant progress recently, catching the attention of academia and industry; however, the existing studies of classification of HSIs mainly focus on the closed-set environment with the assumption that ground classes are fixed and known, ignoring the complexity and diversity of ground objects in the real world. As a result, the unknown classes will be forced into known classes. To solve this problem, we propose a novel spectral-spatial evidential learning (SSEL) network that combines an improved generative adversarial network (GAN) and evidential theory for open-set classification of HSIs. First, a domain adaptation (DA) strategy is embedded into GAN to generate high-quality samples by reducing the distribution discrepancy between generated and real samples. Second, the discriminator is devised to extract spectral-spatial features and output multiclass evidence for closed-set classification and uncertainty estimation. A new classification function called evidence-based loss is designed for the discriminator to guide the evidence-collection process. Additionally, a novel adversarial objective function is defined, where the discriminator loss is devised to predict real samples belonging to the true class and generated samples belonging to “none of the classes. The generator loss is developed to generate samples consistent with the label category. Finally, the class and corresponding uncertainty can be calculated based on the collected evidence and the appropriate open-set classification of HSIs. Extensive experiments on three benchmark HSIs show that our proposed method achieves competitive performance on closed-set and open-set classification of HSIs compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.