Learning Compact and Discriminative Stacked Autoencoder for Hyperspectral Image Classification

As one of the fundamental research topics in remote sensing image analysis, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been extensively studied so far. However, how to discriminatively learn a low-dimensional feature space, in which the mapped features have small within-class scatter and big between-class separation, is still a challenging problem. To address this issue, this paper proposes an effective framework, named compact and discriminative stacked autoencoder (CDSAE), for HSI classification. The proposed CDSAE framework comprises two stages with different optimization objectives, which can learn discriminative low-dimensional feature mappings and train an effective classifier progressively. First, we impose a local Fisher discriminant regularization on each hidden layer of stacked autoencoder (SAE) to train discriminative SAE (DSAE) by minimizing reconstruction error. This stage can learn feature mappings, in which the pixels from the same land-cover class are mapped as nearly as possible and the pixels from different land-cover categories are separated by a large margin. Second, we learn an effective classifier and meanwhile update DSAE with a local Fisher discriminant regularization being embedded on the top of feature representations. Moreover, to learn a compact DSAE with as small number of hidden neurons as possible, we impose a diversity regularization on the hidden neurons of DSAE to balance the feature dimensionality and the feature representation capability. The experimental results on three widely-used HSI data sets and comprehensive comparisons with existing methods demonstrate that our proposed method is effective.