dSPG: A New Discriminant Superpixel Graph Regularizer and Convolutional Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Supervised hyperspectral image classification suffers from the overfitting problem when limited labels are available. Graph-based semisupervised classifiers can tackle this problem by building connections between labeled and unlabeled samples. In this work, we prove the following two propositions for an optimal graph: 1) the interclass connection weights must be 0 and 2) for a given class, a subset must contain labeled samples or be connected to the remaining subset. In a semisupervised scenario, it is very difficult to ensure that the aforementioned propositions hold. Here, we introduce a new discriminant superpixel graph (dSPG) to build a suboptimal graph, which combines a newly proposed within-superpixel graph, aimed at disconnecting pixels belonging to different classes in a superpixel (so as to decrease interclass connection weights) and a between-superpixel graph that connects spectral adjacent superpixels (to increase the intraclass subset connections). We further propose a dSPG regularizer for hyperspectral image classification and a dSPG-guided graph convolutional network (dSPGCN) to extract discriminant features. Experimental results on real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the good performance of our newly proposed dSPG for semisupervised hyperspectral image classification. The source codes for this study are available at
https://github.com/yulong112/dSPG
.