Tripartite-structure transformer for hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral images contain rich spatial and spectral information, which provides a strong basis for distinguishing different land-cover objects. Therefore, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been a hot research topic. With the advent of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become a popular method for hyperspectral image classification. However, convolutional neural network (CNN) has strong local feature extraction ability but cannot deal with long-distance dependence well. Vision Transformer (ViT) is a recent development that can address this limitation, but it is not effective in extracting local features and has low computational efficiency. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a hybrid classification network that combines the strengths of both CNN and ViT, names Spatial-Spectral Former(SSF). The shallow layer employs 3D convolution to extract local features and reduce data dimensions. The deep layer employs a spectral-spatial transformer module for global feature extraction and information enhancement in spectral and spatial dimensions. Our proposed model achieves promising results on widely used public HSI datasets compared to other deep learning methods, including CNN, ViT, and hybrid models.