ES2FL: Ensemble Self-Supervised Feature Learning for Small Sample Classification of Hyperspectral Images

Abstract

Classification with a few labeled samples has always been a longstanding problem in the field of hyperspectral image (HSI) processing and analysis. Aiming at the small sample characteristics of HSI classification, a novel ensemble self-supervised feature-learning (ES2FL) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can automatically learn deep features conducive to classification without any annotation information, significantly reducing the dependence of deep-learning models on massive labeled samples. Firstly, to utilize the spatial–spectral information in HSIs more fully and effectively, EfficientNet-B0 is introduced and used as the backbone to model input samples. Then, through constraining the cross-correlation matrix of different distortions of the same sample to the identity matrix, the designed model can extract the latent features of homogeneous samples gathering together and heterogeneous samples separating from each other in a self-supervised manner. In addition, two ensemble learning strategies, feature-level and view-level ensemble, are proposed to further improve the feature-learning ability and classification performance by jointly utilizing spatial contextual information at different scales and feature information at different bands. Finally, the concatenations of the learned features and the original spectral vectors are inputted into classifiers such as random forest or support vector machine to complete label prediction. Extensive experiments on three widely used HSI data sets show that the proposed ES2FL method can learn more discriminant deep features and achieve better classification performance than existing advanced methods in the case of small samples.