A hyperspectral band selection method based on sparse band attention network for maize seed variety identification

The development of a real-time online system for rapid and nondestructive identification of seed varieties can greatly improve production efficiency in modern agriculture. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a powerful tool for seed variety identification. Nevertheless, hyperspectral data are not only high in dimensionality but also contain redundant information, which is very unfriendly to real-time online applications. Selecting a few representative bands from the entire working spectral region can significantly reduce the equipment cost and computational load of HSI. In the field of food and agr-products quality evaluation, Band selection (BS) methods based on chemometrics have been dominant for a long time. Most of these methods, however, fail to take full account of the nonlinearities and global interactions between spectral bands, which may result in the selection of some adjacent bands that still retain more redundant information. In this paper, a novel BS network is proposed, which is composed of sparse band attention module and classification net module. The former is used to generate weight of each band, and sparse constraint is applied to the weights of redundant bands, while the latter is used to achieve high-performance classification with reweighted data. Furthermore, to solve the problem of gradient updating caused by sparse constraint, a auxiliary loss function is defined to assist optimization. Finally, comparative experiments is conducted on our maize seed hyperspectral dataset. The results demonstrate that the presented method selects a subset of informative bands with less redundant information to obtain better classification performance and outperforms several other existing BS methods.