Central Attention Network for Hyperspectral Imagery Classification

In this article, the intrinsic properties of hyperspectral imagery (HSI) are analyzed, and two principles for spectral-spatial feature extraction of HSI are built, including the foundation of pixel-level HSI classification and the definition of spatial information. Based on the two principles, scaled dot-product central attention (SDPCA) tailored for HSI is designed to extract spectral-spatial information from a central pixel (i.e., a query pixel to be classified) and pixels that are similar to the central pixel on an HSI patch. Then, employed with the HSI-tailored SDPCA module, a central attention network (CAN) is proposed by combining HSI-tailored dense connections of the features of the hidden layers and the spectral information of the query pixel. MiniCAN as a simplified version of CAN is also investigated. Superior classification performance of CAN and miniCAN on three datasets of different scenarios demonstrates their effectiveness and benefits compared with state-of-the-art methods.