MR-Selection: A Meta-Reinforcement Learning Approach for Zero-Shot Hyperspectral Band Selection

Band selection is an effective method to deal with the difficulties in image transmission, storage, and processing caused by redundant and noisy bands in hyperspectral images (HSIs). Existing band selection methods usually need to learn a specific model for each HSI dataset, which ignores the inherent correlation and common knowledge among different band selection tasks. Meanwhile, these methods lead to a huge waste of computation. In this article, a novel zero-shot band selection method, called MR-Selection, is proposed for HSI classification. It formalizes zero-shot band selection as a metalearning problem, where advantage actor–critic algorithm-based reinforcement learning (A2C-RL) is designed to extract the metaknowledge in the band selection tasks of various seen hyperspectral datasets through a shared agent. To learn a consistent representation among different tasks, a dynamic structure-aware graph convolutional network is constructed to build a shared agent in A2C-RL. In A2C-RL, the state is tailored in a feasible way and easy to adapt to various tasks. Meanwhile, the reward is defined according to an efficient evaluation network, which can evaluate each state effectively without any fine-tuning. Furthermore, a two-stage optimization strategy is designed to coordinate optimization directions of a shared agent from different tasks effectively. Once the shared agent is optimized, it can be directly applied to unseen HSI band selection tasks without any available samples. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the MR-Selection on the band selection of unseen HSI datasets.