RSSGL: Statistical Loss Regularized 3-D ConvLSTM for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Studies on the classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs) based on deep learning are in full swing, especially the spectral-spatial dependent global learning (SSDGL) framework, which is both efficient and robust. However, the global convolutional long short-term memory (GCL) module under this framework fails to take full consideration of the spectral characteristics contained in HSIs, and the hierarchically balanced (H-B) sampling strategy introduced in this framework prevents the training process from converging smoothly. In this article, we develop a novel regularized spectral-spatial global learning (RSSGL) framework. Compared with SSDGL, the proposed framework mainly makes three improvements. Above all, aiming at the problem that the GCL module used in SSDGL cannot fully tap the local spectral dependence, we apply 3-D convolution to the gated units of long short-term memory (LSTM) as an alternative to the GCL module for adjacent and nonadjacent spectral dependencies learning. Furthermore, to extract the most discriminative features, an improved statistical loss regularization term is developed, in which we introduce a simple but effective diversity-promoting condition to make it more reasonable and suitable for deep metric learning in HSI classification. Finally, to effectively address the performance oscillation caused by the H-B sampling strategy, the proposed framework adopts an early stopping strategy to save and restore the optimal model parameters, making it more flexible and stable. Experiments conducted on three representative datasets show that the proposed RSSGL has superior classification performance compared with the existing relatively excellent research methods. The source code is released at https://github.com/swiftest/RSSGL .