Convolutional Neural Network with Expert Knowledge for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Imagery Classification

The recent interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning has partly contributed to an interest in the use of such approaches for hyperspectral remote sensing (HRS) imagery classification, as evidenced by the increasing number of deep framework with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) structures proposed in the literature. In these approaches, the assumption of obtaining high quality deep features by using CNN is not always easy and efficient because of the complex data distribution and the limited sample size. In this paper, conventional handcrafted learning-based multi features based on expert knowledge are introduced as the input of a special designed CNN to improve the pixel description and classification performance of HRS imagery. The introduction of these handcrafted features can reduce the complexity of the original HRS data and reduce the sample requirements by eliminating redundant information and improving the starting point of deep feature training It also provides some concise and effective features that are not readily available from direct training with CNN. Evaluations using three public HRS datasets demonstrate the utility of our proposed method in HRS classification.