Spatial–Spectral Graph Contrastive Clustering With Hard Sample Mining for Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is a fundamental yet challenging task that groups image pixels with similar features into distinct clusters. Among various approaches, contrastive learning methods, which employ the concept of encouraging semantically similar samples to move closer together while pushing semantically inconsistent samples apart, have garnered significant attention due to their promising performance. However, the most prevalent approaches face two major limitations: 1) treating all samples indiscriminately during optimization, where the abundance of well-categorized samples overwhelms the feature learning process and 2) tending to introduce noise when constructing positive sample pairs through view augmentation or searching the nearest neighbors, which would cause semantic drift of sample features. To solve these issues, we propose a graph autoencoder-based deep clustering framework named spatial–spectral graph contrastive clustering with hard sample mining (SSGCC) that constructs spatial–spectral dual views without data augmentation and focuses more on hard samples rather than treating all samples equally with the aid of spatial–spectral features. Concretely, we extract the spectral features and the neighborhood spatial features of the samples as dual branches to avoid the noise caused by data augmentation and develop the cluster-oriented consistency learning to facilitate the exchange of knowledge between the two spectral–spatial perspectives. In addition, we propose a hard sample mining-based contrastive learning scheme with the aid of spatial–spectral features. To better measure the importance of the samples, we combine spatial features and spectral features to calculate the similarity between sample pairs. The weights of hard sample pairs are dynamically up-weight while the easy ones are down-weighting to improve the discriminative capability. Extensive experiments on four benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods against state-of-the-art ones.