First-Order Smoothing-Based Deep Graph Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Although graph convolutional network (GCN) has achieved remarkable success in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, most existing GCN-based approaches have failed to realize a deep network structure due to the oversmoothing problem. This problem largely limits the expression ability and feature extraction ability of GCN and hampers GCN’s capacity to model long-range relationships between samples in hyperspectral (HS) scenes. Moreover, there is a lack of theoretical analysis in those works that constructed deep GCN for HSI classification to illustrate how they overcome the oversmoothing problem. Aside from this, the characteristics and complexity of HSI are often neglected when constructing deep GCN models in HSI classification. To address these problems, a novel deep graph network based on first-order smoothing is proposed for HSI classification. Specifically, a local and global topologically consistent graph is constructed to thoroughly explore the union between fine pixel information and semantic superpixel information. Subsequently, a novel propagation procedure is proposed to address the oversmoothing problem. We creatively build a residual connection to the first layer to emphasize the feature information aggregated from the first-order neighborhood, which adds node features that have not yet become indistinguishable into deep layer, and at the same time, it can be considered as a correction to the original pixels affected by spectral variation in the input graph. Finally, we demonstrate how first-order smoothing-based deep graph network (FSDGN) can slow down the convergence rate of the oversmoothing problem by analyzing the propagation of FSDGN from the standpoint of the Laplacian spectral domain. In addition, the results of experiments performed on three benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods.