Spectral-Spatial Transformer with Active Transfer Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

The classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) is a challenging task due to the high spectral dimensionality and limited labeled data typically available for training. In this study, we propose a novel multi-stage active transfer learning (ATL) framework that integrates a Spatial-Spectral Transformer (SST) with an active learning process for efficient HSI classification. Our approach leverages a pre-trained (initially trained) SST model, fine-tuned iteratively on newly acquired labeled samples using an uncertainty-diversity (Spatial-Spectral Neighborhood Diversity) querying mechanism. This mechanism identifies the most informative and diverse samples, thereby optimizing the transfer learning process to reduce both labeling costs and model uncertainty. We further introduce a dynamic freezing strategy, selectively freezing layers of the SST model to minimize computational overhead while maintaining adaptability to spectral variations in new data. One of the key innovations in our work is the self-calibration of spectral and spatial attention weights, achieved through uncertainty-guided active learning. This not only enhances the model's robustness in handling dynamic and disjoint spectral profiles but also improves generalization across multiple HSI datasets. Additionally, we present a diversity-promoting sampling strategy that ensures the selected samples span distinct spectral regions, preventing overfitting to particular spectral classes. Experiments on benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate that the SST-ATL framework significantly outperforms existing CNN and SST-based methods, offering superior accuracy, efficiency, and computational performance. The source code can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/mahmad000/ATL-SST}.

A Comprehensive Survey for Hyperspectral Image Classification: The Evolution from Conventional to Transformers

Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSC) is a challenging task due to the high dimensionality and complex nature of Hyperspectral (HS) data. Traditional Machine Learning approaches while effective, face challenges in real-world data due to varying optimal feature sets, subjectivity in human-driven design, biases, and limitations. Traditional approaches encounter the curse of dimensionality, struggle with feature selection and extraction, lack spatial information consideration, exhibit limited robustness to noise, face scalability issues, and may not adapt well to complex data distributions. In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) techniques have emerged as powerful tools for addressing these challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current trends and future prospects in HSC, focusing on the advancements from DL models to the emerging use of Transformers. We review the key concepts, methodologies, and state-of-the-art approaches in DL for HSC. We explore the potential of Transformer-based models in HSC, outlining their benefits and challenges. We also delve into emerging trends in HSC, as well as thorough discussions on Explainable AI and Interoperability concepts along with Diffusion Models (image denoising, feature extraction, and image fusion). Lastly, we address several open challenges and research questions pertinent to HSC. Comprehensive experimental results have been undertaken using three HS datasets to verify the efficacy of various conventional DL models and Transformers. Finally, we outline future research directions and potential applications that can further enhance the accuracy and efficiency of HSC. The Source code is available at \href{https://github.com/mahmad00/Conventional-to-Transformer-for-Hyperspectral-Image-Classification-Survey-2024}{github.com/mahmad00}.

Quranic Audio Dataset: Crowdsourced and Labeled Recitation from Non-Arabic Speakers

This paper addresses the challenge of learning to recite the Quran for non-Arabic speakers. We explore the possibility of crowdsourcing a carefully annotated Quranic dataset, on top of which AI models can be built to simplify the learning process. In particular, we use the volunteer-based crowdsourcing genre and implement a crowdsourcing API to gather audio assets. We integrated the API into an existing mobile application called NamazApp to collect audio recitations. We developed a crowdsourcing platform called Quran Voice for annotating the gathered audio assets. As a result, we have collected around 7000 Quranic recitations from a pool of 1287 participants across more than 11 non-Arabic countries, and we have annotated 1166 recitations from the dataset in six categories. We have achieved a crowd accuracy of 0.77, an inter-rater agreement of 0.63 between the annotators, and 0.89 between the labels assigned by the algorithm and the expert judgments.

Transformers Fusion across Disjoint Samples for Hyperspectral Image Classification

3D Swin Transformer (3D-ST) known for its hierarchical attention and window-based processing, excels in capturing intricate spatial relationships within images. Spatial-spectral Transformer (SST), meanwhile, specializes in modeling long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel method: an attentional fusion of these two transformers to significantly enhance the classification performance of Hyperspectral Images (HSIs). What sets this approach apart is its emphasis on the integration of attentional mechanisms from both architectures. This integration not only refines the modeling of spatial and spectral information but also contributes to achieving more precise and accurate classification results. The experimentation and evaluation of benchmark HSI datasets underscore the importance of employing disjoint training, validation, and test samples. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the fusion approach, showcasing its superiority over traditional methods and individual transformers. Incorporating disjoint samples enhances the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology, emphasizing its potential for advancing hyperspectral image classification.

Pyramid Hierarchical Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Classification

The traditional Transformer model encounters challenges with variable-length input sequences, particularly in Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSIC), leading to efficiency and scalability concerns. To overcome this, we propose a pyramid-based hierarchical transformer (PyFormer). This innovative approach organizes input data hierarchically into segments, each representing distinct abstraction levels, thereby enhancing processing efficiency for lengthy sequences. At each level, a dedicated transformer module is applied, effectively capturing both local and global context. Spatial and spectral information flow within the hierarchy facilitates communication and abstraction propagation. Integration of outputs from different levels culminates in the final input representation. Experimental results underscore the superiority of the proposed method over traditional approaches. Additionally, the incorporation of disjoint samples augments robustness and reliability, thereby highlighting the potential of our approach in advancing HSIC. The source code is available at https://github.com/mahmad00/PyFormer.

Importance of Disjoint Sampling in Conventional and Transformer Models for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Disjoint sampling is critical for rigorous and unbiased evaluation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. When training, validation, and test sets overlap or share data, it introduces a bias that inflates performance metrics and prevents accurate assessment of a model's true ability to generalize to new examples. This paper presents an innovative disjoint sampling approach for training SOTA models on Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) tasks. By separating training, validation, and test data without overlap, the proposed method facilitates a fairer evaluation of how well a model can classify pixels it was not exposed to during training or validation. Experiments demonstrate the approach significantly improves a model's generalization compared to alternatives that include training and validation data in test data. By eliminating data leakage between sets, disjoint sampling provides reliable metrics for benchmarking progress in HSIC. Researchers can have confidence that reported performance truly reflects a model's capabilities for classifying new scenes, not just memorized pixels. This rigorous methodology is critical for advancing SOTA models and their real-world application to large-scale land mapping with Hyperspectral sensors. The source code is available at https://github.com/mahmad00/Disjoint-Sampling-for-Hyperspectral-Image-Classification.

Traditional to Transformers: A Survey on Current Trends and Future Prospects for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification is a challenging task due to the high dimensionality and complex nature of hyperspectral data. In recent years, deep learning techniques have emerged as powerful tools for addressing these challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current trends and future prospects in hyperspectral image classification, focusing on the advancements from deep learning models to the emerging use of transformers. We review the key concepts, methodologies, and state-of-the-art approaches in deep learning for hyperspectral image classification. Additionally, we discuss the potential of transformer-based models in this field and highlight the advantages and challenges associated with these approaches. Comprehensive experimental results have been undertaken using three Hyperspectral datasets to verify the efficacy of various conventional deep-learning models and Transformers. Finally, we outline future research directions and potential applications that can further enhance the accuracy and efficiency of hyperspectral image classification. The Source code is available at https://github.com/mahmad00/Conventional-to-Transformer-for-Hyperspectral-Image-Classification-Survey-2024.

Attention Mechanism Meets with Hybrid Dense Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are more suitable, indeed. However, fixed kernel sizes make traditional CNN too specific, neither flexible nor conducive to feature learning, thus impacting on the classification accuracy. The convolution of different kernel size networks may overcome this problem by capturing more discriminating and relevant information. In light of this, the proposed solution aims at combining the core idea of 3D and 2D Inception net with the Attention mechanism to boost the HSIC CNN performance in a hybrid scenario. The resulting \textit{attention-fused hybrid network} (AfNet) is based on three attention-fused parallel hybrid sub-nets with different kernels in each block repeatedly using high-level features to enhance the final ground-truth maps. In short, AfNet is able to selectively filter out the discriminative features critical for classification. Several tests on HSI datasets provided competitive results for AfNet compared to state-of-the-art models. The proposed pipeline achieved, indeed, an overall accuracy of 97\% for the Indian Pines, 100\% for Botswana, 99\% for Pavia University, Pavia Center, and Salinas datasets.

3D/2D regularized CNN feature hierarchy for Hyperspectral image classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been rigorously studied for Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSIC) and are known to be effective in exploiting joint spatial-spectral information with the expense of lower generalization performance and learning speed due to the hard labels and non-uniform distribution over labels. Several regularization techniques have been used to overcome the aforesaid issues. However, sometimes models learn to predict the samples extremely confidently which is not good from a generalization point of view. Therefore, this paper proposed an idea to enhance the generalization performance of a hybrid CNN for HSIC using soft labels that are a weighted average of the hard labels and uniform distribution over ground labels. The proposed method helps to prevent CNN from becoming over-confident. We empirically show that in improving generalization performance, label smoothing also improves model calibration which significantly improves beam-search. Several publicly available Hyperspectral datasets are used to validate the experimental evaluation which reveals improved generalization performance, statistical significance, and computational complexity as compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code will be made available at https://github.com/mahmad00.

Hyperspectral Image Classification: Artifacts of Dimension Reduction on Hybrid CNN

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has been extensively studied for Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSIC) more specifically, 2D and 3D CNN models have proved highly efficient in exploiting the spatial and spectral information of Hyperspectral Images. However, 2D CNN only considers the spatial information and ignores the spectral information whereas 3D CNN jointly exploits spatial-spectral information at a high computational cost. Therefore, this work proposed a lightweight CNN (3D followed by 2D-CNN) model which significantly reduces the computational cost by distributing spatial-spectral feature extraction across a lighter model alongside a preprocessing that has been carried out to improve the classification results. Five benchmark Hyperspectral datasets (i.e., SalinasA, Salinas, Indian Pines, Pavia University, Pavia Center, and Botswana) are used for experimental evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed pipeline outperformed in terms of generalization performance, statistical significance, and computational complexity, as compared to the state-of-the-art 2D/3D CNN models except commonly used computationally expensive design choices.