Deep Transfer Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) includes a vast quantities of samples, large number of bands, as well as randomly occurring redundancy. Classifying such complex data is challenging, and the classification performance generally is affected significantly by the amount of labeled training samples. Collecting such labeled training samples is labor and time consuming, motivating the idea of borrowing and reusing labeled samples from other preexisting related images. Therefore transfer learning, which can mitigate the semantic gap between existing and new HSI, has recently drawn increasing research attention. However, existing transfer learning methods for HSI which concentrated on how to overcome the divergence among images, may neglect the high level latent features during the transfer learning process. In this paper, we present two novel ideas based on this observation. We propose constructing and connecting higher level features for the source and target HSI data, to further overcome the cross-domain disparity. Different from existing methods, no priori knowledge on the target domain is needed for the proposed classification framework, and the proposed framework works for both homogeneous and heterogenous HSI data. Experimental results on real world hyperspectral images indicate the significance of the proposed method in HSI classification.