Spectral and Spatial Global Context Attention for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Recently, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has attracted increasing attention in the remote sensing field. Plenty of CNN-based methods with diverse attention mechanisms (AMs) have been proposed for HSI classification due to AMs being able to improve the quality of feature representations. However, some of the previous AMs squeeze global spatial or channel information directly by pooling operations to yield feature descriptors, which inadequately utilize global contextual information. Besides, some AMs cannot exploit the interactions among channels or positions with the aid of nonlinear transformation well. In this article, a spectral-spatial network with channel and position global context (GC) attention (SSGCA) is proposed to capture discriminative spectral and spatial features. Firstly, a spectral-spatial network is designed to extract spectral and spatial features. Secondly, two novel GC attentions are proposed to optimize the spectral and spatial features respectively for feature enhancement. The channel GC attention is used to capture channel dependencies to emphasize informative features while the position GC attention focuses on position dependencies. Both GC attentions aggregate global contextual features of positions or channels adequately, following a nonlinear transformation. Experimental results on several public HSI datasets demonstrate that the spectral-spatial network with GC attentions outperforms other related methods.