Composite Neighbor-Aware Convolutional Metric Networks for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Supervised classification of hyperspectral image (HSI) is generally required to obtain better performance in spectral-spatial feature learning by fully using complex pixel- and superpixel-level interdependencies with small labeled samples. Limited by the local regular convolutions, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can only exploit information from the short-range Euclidean neighbors of a target, hindering the effectiveness of feature representation. In contrast, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) can learn long-range dependencies between non-Euclidean neighbors but usually require the input of a full graph constructed from a whole HSI, making GCNs must be trained in a full-batch manner with tremendous computational consumption. In this work, we propose a composite neighbor-aware convolutional metric network (CNCMN), aiming to learn each target's representation from its composite neighbors (i.e., both Euclidean and non-Euclidean neighbors) in a batchwise manner. Specifically, for each target in an HSI, its Euclidean neighbors are the pixels in the local square region centered on itself, and its non-Euclidean neighbors are several related nodes selected from the constructed full graph. Correspondingly, a composite convolution (CoConv) is proposed by coupling an image convolution and a graph convolution, which can perform flexible convolutions on those composite neighbors and extract adaptively fused features from them. Besides, to further boost classification, we also propose a mini-batch metric classifier to dynamically optimize interclass and intraclass distances of samples batch by batch, which is then combined with the CoConv to form the mini-batch CNCMN. Extensive experiments on three real-world HSIs demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over mini-batch deep learning algorithms and have obtained the state-of-the-art performance in these fields. The code is available at: https://github.com/qichaoliu/HSI-CNCMN .