Self-Supervised Learning With Multiscale Densely Connected Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In recent years, deep learning-based methods have exhibited remarkable performance in the field of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, conventional supervised methods heavily rely on a substantial number of labeled samples. Self-supervised learning, as a prominent unsupervised representation learning technique, offers the potential to extract valuable information from unlabeled data. In this article, we introduce a novel unsupervised approach called self-supervised learning with the multiscale densely connected network (SS-MSDCNet) to make full use of unlabeled samples for HSI classification. First, a two-stream structure was designed to generate more positive pairs, which enables the contrast self-supervised training to learn more useful information from unlabeled data. Subsequently, a data augmentation technique based on spectral splitting was proposed to coordinate the two-stream structure of SS-MSDCNet, enhancing spectral information expression. The backbone of the proposed approach is the multiscale densely connected network (MSDCNet), which obtains input HSIs with various spatial scales by removing peripheral pixels from the original input and subsequently extracts multiscale spatial-spectral features using 3-D densely connected modules and 3-D spatial attention modules. The 3-D densely connected module effectively harnesses multiscale features extracted by various convolutional layers, while the 3-D spatial attention module enhances the network’s focus on features conducive to accurate classification. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments using four distinct HSI datasets. The results unequivocally demonstrate that SS-MSDCNet outperforms several well-established supervised and unsupervised classification methods. Furthermore, we designed a transfer experiment to confirm SS-MSDCNet’s robust generalization capabilities. The code is available at
https://github.com/mrblank99/SS-MSDCNet
.