Spatial-spectral Classification Based on the Unsupervised Convolutional Sparse Auto-encoder for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Imagery

Current hyperspectral remote sensing imagery spatial-spectral classification methods mainly consider concatenating the spectral information vectors and spatial information vectors together. However, the combined spatial-spectral information vectors may cause information loss and concatenation deficiency for the classification task. To efficiently represent the spatial-spectral feature information around the central pixel within a neighbourhood window, the unsupervised convolutional sparse auto-encoder (UCSAE) with window-in-window selection strategy is proposed in this paper. Window-in-window selection strategy selects the sub-window spatial-spectral information for the spatial-spectral feature learning and extraction with the sparse auto-encoder (SAE). Convolution mechanism is applied after the SAE feature extraction stage with the SAE features upon the larger outer window. The UCSAE algorithm was validated by two common hyperspectral imagery (HSI) datasets—Pavia University dataset and the Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) dataset, which shows an improvement over the traditional hyperspectral spatial-spectral classification methods. * Corresponding author