Multilayer Global Spectral–Spatial Attention Network for Wetland Hyperspectral Image Classification

Coastal wetland monitoring plays an important role in the protection and restoration of ecosystems in this world. UAV-hyperspectral imaging, as an emerging technique for Earth observation and space exploration, provides the huge potential ability to identify different wetland species. In this work, a multilayer global spectral–spatial attention network (MGSSAN) is proposed for mapping coastal wetlands, which mainly consists of two major steps. First, a two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) framework with residual connection is developed to obtain an initial classification probability map, in which one branch is used to capture the spectral information, the other branch is used to extract spatial information, and a global spectral–spatial attention module is designed to guide networks focusing on those features that are more discriminative. Second, an extended random walker method is utilized to optimize the initial classification probabilities, so as to yield the final map. Experiments performed on three wetland HSI datasets created by ourselves verify that the proposed method can obtain superior performance with respect to several state-of-the-art hyperspectral image classification methods.