Deep Network With Irregular Convolutional Kernels and Self-Expressive Property for Classification of Hyperspectral Images

This article presents a novel deep network with irregular convolutional kernels and self-expressive property (DIKS) for the classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs). Specifically, we use the principal component analysis (PCA) and superpixel segmentation to obtain a series of irregular patches, which are regarded as convolutional kernels of our network. With such kernels, the feature maps of HSIs can be adaptively computed to well describe the characteristics of each object class. After multiple convolutional layers, features exported by all convolution operations are combined into a stacked form with both shallow and deep features. These stacked features are then clustered by introducing the self-expression theory to produce final features. Unlike most traditional deep learning approaches, the DIKS method has the advantage of self-adaptability to the given HSI due to building irregular kernels. In addition, this proposed method does not require any training operations for feature extraction. Because of using both shallow and deep features, the DIKS has the advantage of being multiscale. Due to introducing self-expression, the DIKS method can export more discriminative features for HSI classification. Extensive experimental results are provided to validate that our method achieves better classification performance compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.