A Spectral-Spatial Cascaded 3D Convolutional Neural Network with a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Deep learning methods used for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification often achieve greater accuracy than traditional algorithms but require large numbers of training epochs. To simplify model structures and reduce their training epochs, an end-to-end deep learning framework incorporating a spectral-spatial cascaded 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) with a convolutional long short-term memory (CLSTM) network, called SSCC, is proposed herein for HSI classification. The SSCC framework employs cascaded 3D CNN to learn the spectral-spatial features of HSIs and uses the CLSTM network to extract sequence features. Residual connections are used in SSCC to accelerate model convergence, with the outputs of previous convolutional layers concatenated as inputs for subsequent layers. Moreover, the data augmentation, parametric rectified linear unit, dynamic learning rate, batch normalization, and regularization (including dropout and L2) methods are used to increase classification accuracy and prevent overfitting. These attributes allow the SSCC framework to achieve good performance for HSI classification within 20 epochs. Three well-known datasets including Indiana Pines, University of Pavia, and Pavia Center were employed to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed algorithm. The GF-5 dataset of Anxin County, obtained from China’s recently launched spaceborne Advanced Hyperspectral Imager, was also used for classification experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SSCC framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with better training efficiency than other deep learning methods.