BS-Nets: An End-to-End Framework for Band Selection of Hyperspectral Image

Hyperspectral image (HSI) consists of hundreds of continuous narrowbands with high spectral correlation, which would lead to the so-called Hughes phenomenon and the high computational cost in processing. Band selection (BS) has been proven to be effective in avoiding such problems by removing redundant bands. However, many existing BS methods separately estimate the significance for every single band and cannot fully consider the nonlinear and global interaction between spectral bands. In this article, by assuming that a complete HSI band set can be reconstructed from its few informative bands, we propose a unified BS framework, BS Network (BS-Net). The framework consists of a band attention module (BAM), which aims to explicitly model the nonlinear interdependences between spectral bands, and a reconstruction network (RecNet), which is used to restore the original HSI from the learned informative bands, resulting in a flexible architecture. The resulting framework is end-to-end trainable, making it easier to train from scratch and to combine with many existing networks. We implement two versions of BS-Nets, respectively, using fully connected networks (BS-Net-FC) and convolutional neural networks (BS-Net-Conv), and extensively compare their results with popular existing BS approaches on three real hyperspectral data sets, showing that the proposed BS-Nets can accurately select informative band subset with less redundancy and outperform the competitors in terms of classification accuracy with competitive time cost.