A New Dual-Branch Embedded Multivariate Attention Network for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Classification

With the continuous maturity of hyperspectral remote sensing imaging technology, it has been widely adopted by scholars to improve the performance of feature classification. However, due to the challenges in acquiring hyperspectral images and producing training samples, the limited training sample is a common problem that researchers often face. Furthermore, efficient algorithms are necessary to excavate the spatial and spectral information from these images, and then, make full use of this information with limited training samples. To solve this problem, a novel two-branch deep learning network model is proposed for extracting hyperspectral remote sensing features in this paper. In this model, one branch focuses on extracting spectral features using multi-scale convolution and a normalization-based attention module, while the other branch captures spatial features through small-scale dilation convolution and Euclidean Similarity Attention. Subsequently, pooling and layering techniques are employed to further extract abstract features after feature fusion. In the experiments conducted on two public datasets, namely, IP and UP, as well as our own labeled dataset, namely, YRE, the proposed DMAN achieves the best classification results, with overall accuracies of 96.74%, 97.4%, and 98.08%, respectively. Compared to the sub-optimal state-of-the-art methods, the overall accuracies are improved by 1.05, 0.42, and 0.51 percentage points, respectively. The advantage of this network structure is particularly evident in unbalanced sample environments. Additionally, we introduce a new strategy based on the RPNet, which utilizes a small number of principal components for feature classification after dimensionality reduction. The results demonstrate its effectiveness in uncovering compressed feature information, with an overall accuracy improvement of 0.68 percentage points. Consequently, our model helps mitigate the impact of data scarcity on model performance, thereby contributing positively to the advancement of hyperspectral remote sensing technology in practical applications.