Uncertain Category-Aware Fusion Network for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Joint Classification

The integration of hyperspectral (HS) imagery and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for land cover classification has become a significant research topic. Numerous existing methods aim to interactively fuse the complementary features of HS and LiDAR to enhance the classification accuracy. However, most existing studies overlook the fact that spectral, spatial, and elevation features of HS and LiDAR possess significant discriminative information for specific categories. The rough and simple interacting or stacking these features may hinder the effective expression of this significant discriminative information. Moreover, existing approaches neglect the shared spatial characteristics between HS and LiDAR. In this article, an uncertain category-aware fusion network (UCAFNet) is proposed to tackle the above challenges. Specifically, we proposed an uncertain category-aware fusion strategy (UCAFS) that dynamically weights the spectral, spatial, and elevation branches based on their respective capabilities in identifying different categories to achieve targeted information aggregation. Moreover, we introduce the spatial information purification module (SIPM) and adaptive weighted fusion module (AWFM), to extract and enhance shared spatial features from HS and LiDAR for effective integration. The experimental results on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed UCAFNet.