Spectral-Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Imagery Based on Stacked Sparse Autoencoder and Random Forest

It is of great interest in exploiting spectral-spatial information for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification at different spatial resolutions. This paper proposes a new spectral-spatial deep learning-based classification paradigm. First, pixel-based scale transformation and class separability criteria are employed to measure appropriate spatial resolution HSI, and then we integrate the spectral and spatial information (i.e., both implicit and explicit features) together to construct a joint spectral-spatial feature set. Second, as a deep learning architecture, stacked sparse autoencoder provides strong learning performance and is expected to exploit even more abstract and high-level feature representations from both spectral and spatial domains. Specifically, random forest (RF) classifier is first introduced into stacked sparse autoencoder for HSI classification, based on the fact that it provides better tradeoff among generalization performance, prediction accuracy and operation speed compared to other traditional procedures. Experiments on two real HSIs demonstrate that the proposed framework generates competitive performance.