A NEW MULTI-LEVEL ATTENTION FEATURE FUSION METHOD FOR HYPERSPECTRAL AND LIDAR DATA JOINT CLASSIFICATION

Joint classification of multisource data for better Earth observation becomes an interesting but challenging problem. However, existing methods usually fail to be optimal due to the limitations in the heterogeneous feature representation and complementary information fusion. In this paper, we propose a new multi-level attention-based feature fusion method for the joint classification of HSI and LiDAR data. First, a two-stream deep network is built to extract the spectral-spatial feature of HSI and the elevation feature of LiDAR, respectively. To fully use the complementary and correlated information of HSI and LiDAR data, we adopt attention-based feature extraction and fusion module to deliver a high-discrimination feature representation both for cross-source and single-source data. Then, the extracted features are fed into fully connected layers to generate class probabilities. Finally, a decision-level fusion strategy is adopted to further improve the classification results. Extensive experiments on the Houston dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over some state-of-the-art approaches.