Multiscale Pixel-Level and Superpixel-Level Method for Hyperspectral Image Classification: Adaptive Attention and Parallel Multi-Hop Graph Convolution

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have led to promising advancements in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification; however, traditional CNNs with fixed square convolution kernels are insufficiently flexible to handle irregular structures. Similarly, GCNs that employ superpixel nodes instead of pixel nodes may overlook pixel-level features; both networks tend to extract features locally and cause loss of multilayer contextual semantic information during feature extraction due to the fixed kernel. To leverage the strengths of CNNs and GCNs, we propose a multiscale pixel-level and superpixel-level (MPAS)-based HSI classification method. The network consists of two sub-networks for extracting multi-level information of HSIs: a multi-scale hybrid spectral–spatial attention convolution branch (HSSAC) and a parallel multi-hop graph convolution branch (MGCN). HSSAC comprehensively captures pixel-level features with different kernel sizes through parallel multi-scale convolution and cross-path fusion to reduce the semantic information loss caused by fixed convolution kernels during feature extraction and learns adjustable weights from the adaptive spectral–spatial attention module (SSAM) to capture pixel-level feature correlations with less computation. MGCN can systematically aggregate multi-hop contextual information to better model HSIs’ spatial background structure using the relationship between parallel multi-hop graph transformation nodes. The proposed MPAS effectively captures multi-layer contextual semantic features by leveraging pixel-level and superpixel-level spectral–spatial information, which improves the performance of the HSI classification task while ensuring computational efficiency. Extensive evaluation experiments on three real-world HSI datasets demonstrate that MPAS outperforms other state-of-the-art networks, demonstrating its superior feature learning capabilities.