Deep Ensembles for Hyperspectral Image Data Classification and Unmixing

Hyperspectral images capture very detailed information about scanned objects and, hence, can be used to uncover various characteristics of the materials present in the analyzed scene. However, such image data are difficult to transfer due to their large volume, and generating new ground-truth datasets that could be utilized to train supervised learners is costly, time-consuming, very user-dependent, and often infeasible in practice. The research efforts have been focusing on developing algorithms for hyperspectral data classification and unmixing, which are two main tasks in the analysis chain of such imagery. Although in both of them, the deep learning techniques have bloomed as an extremely effective tool, designing the deep models that generalize well over the unseen data is a serious practical challenge in emerging applications. In this paper, we introduce the deep ensembles benefiting from different architectural advances of convolutional base models and suggest a new approach towards aggregating the outputs of base learners using a supervised fuser. Furthermore, we propose a model augmentation technique that allows us to synthesize new deep networks based on the original one by injecting Gaussian noise into the model’s weights. The experiments, performed for both hyperspectral data classification and unmixing, show that our deep ensembles outperform base spectral and spectral-spatial deep models and classical ensembles employing voting and averaging as a fusing scheme in both hyperspectral image analysis tasks.