Attention-Embedded Triple-Fusion Branch CNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is widely used in various fields owing to its rich spectral information. Nonetheless, the high dimensionality of HSI and the limited number of labeled data remain significant obstacles to HSI classification technology. To alleviate the above problems, we propose an attention-embedded triple-branch fusion convolutional neural network (AETF-Net) for an HSI classification. The network consists of a spectral attention branch, a spatial attention branch, and a multi-attention fusion branch (MAFB). The spectral branch introduces the cross-channel attention to alleviate the band redundancy problem in high dimensions, while the spatial branch preserves the location information of features and eliminates interfering image elements by a bi-directional spatial attention module. These pre-extracted spectral and spatial attention features are then embedded into a novel MAFB with large kernel decomposition technique. The proposed AETF-Net achieves multi-attention features reuse and extracts more representative and discriminative features. Experimental results on three well-known datasets demonstrate the superiority of the method AETF-Net.