A Robust Context-Based Deep Learning Approach for Highly Imbalanced Hyperspectral Classification

Hyperspectral imaging is an area of active research with many applications in remote sensing, mineral exploration, and environmental monitoring. Deep learning and, in particular, convolution-based approaches are the current state-of-the-art classification models. However, in the presence of noisy hyperspectral datasets, these deep convolutional neural networks underperform. In this paper, we proposed a feature augmentation approach to increase noise resistance in imbalanced hyperspectral classification. Our method calculates context-based features, and it uses a deep convolutional neuronet (DCN). We tested our proposed approach on the Pavia datasets and compared three models, DCN, PCA + DCN, and our context-based DCN, using the original datasets and the datasets plus noise. Our experimental results show that DCN and PCA + DCN perform well on the original datasets but not on the noisy datasets. Our robust context-based DCN was able to outperform others in the presence of noise and was able to maintain a comparable classification accuracy on clean hyperspectral images.