A Multibranch Crossover Feature Attention Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Recently, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown impressive performance. However, HSI classification still faces two challenging problems: the first challenge is that most existing classification approaches only focus on exploiting the fixed-scale convolutional kernels to extract spectral–spatial features, which leads to underutilization of information; the second challenge is that HSI contains a large amount of redundant information and noise, to a certain extent, which influences the classification performance of CNN. In order to tackle the above problems, this article proposes a multibranch crossover feature attention network (MCFANet) for HSI classification. The MCFANet involves two primary submodules: a cross feature extraction module (CFEM) and rearranged attention module (RAM). The former is devised to capture joint spectral–spatial features at different convolutional layers, scales and branches, which can increase the diversity and complementarity of spectral–spatial features, while the latter is constructed to spontaneously concentrate on recalibrating spatial-wise and spectral-wise feature responses, meanwhile exploit the shifted cascade operation to rearrange the obtained attention-enhanced features to dispel redundant information and noise, and thus, boost the classification performance. Compared with the state-of-the-art classification methods, massive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the meliority of our presented method.