Spatial-spectral feature classification of hyperspectral image using a pretrained deep convolutional neural network

Deep learning based methods have recently been successfully explored in hyperspectral image classification field. However, training a deep learning model still requires a large number of labeled samples, which is usually impractical in hyperspectral images. In this paper, a simple but effective feature extraction method is proposed for hyperspectral image classification. Specifically, a pretrained deep convolutional neural network based on the ImageNet dataset is used to extract spatial features of a hyperspectral image. Recently, it is easy to obtain a pretrained convolutional neural network on the Internet. Note that the pretrained models are trained by using the ImageNet dataset. This means that the proposed method does not need labeled hyperspectral samples to train the deep model. Therefore, the proposed method alleviates the problem of lacking labeled samples and avoids the artificial design of feature extraction rules. Finally, the extracted features are stacked with spectral features as the input of a support vector machine classifier. The proposed method is conducted on three widely used hyperspectral image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could outperform the conventional feature extraction methods and deep learning based methods.