Naive Gabor Networks

In this paper, we introduce naive Gabor Networks or Gabor-Nets which, for the first time in the literature, design and learn convolutional kernels strictly in the form of Gabor filters, aiming to reduce the number of parameters and constrain the solution space for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In comparison with other Gabor-based methods, Gabor-Nets exploit the phase offset of the sinusoid harmonic to control the frequency characteristics of Gabor kernels, being able to adjust the convolutional kernels in accordance with the data from a frequency perspective. Furthermore, a fast 1-D decomposition of the Gabor kernel is implemented, bringing the original quadratic computational complexity of 2-D convolutions to a linear one. We evaluated our newly developed Gabor-Nets on two remotely sensed hyperspectral benchmarks, showing that our model architecture can significantly improve the convergence speed and the performance of CNNs, particularly when very limited training samples are available.