Feature Extraction and Classification Based on Spatial-Spectral ConvLSTM Neural Network for Hyperspectral Images

In recent years, deep learning has presented a great advance in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Particularly, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), as a special deep learning structure, has shown great ability in modeling long-term dependencies in the time dimension of video or the spectral dimension of HSIs. However, the loss of spatial information makes it quite difficult to obtain the better performance. In order to address this problem, two novel deep models are proposed to extract more discriminative spatial-spectral features by exploiting the Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) for the first time. By taking the data patch in a local sliding window as the input of each memory cell band by band, the 2-D extended architecture of LSTM is considered for building the spatial-spectral ConvLSTM 2-D Neural Network (SSCL2DNN) to model long-range dependencies in the spectral domain. To take advantage of spatial and spectral information more effectively for extracting a more discriminative spatial-spectral feature representation, the spatial-spectral ConvLSTM 3-D Neural Network (SSCL3DNN) is further proposed by extending LSTM to 3-D version. The experiments, conducted on three commonly used HSI data sets, demonstrate that the proposed deep models have certain competitive advantages and can provide better classification performance than other state-of-the-art approaches.