Symmetric All Convolutional Neural-Network-Based Unsupervised Feature Extraction for Hyperspectral Images Classification

Recently, deep-learning-based feature extraction (FE) methods have shown great potential in hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. Unfortunately, it also brings a challenge that the training of the deep learning networks always requires large amounts of labeled samples, which is hardly available for HSI data. To address this issue, in this article, a novel unsupervised deep-learning-based FE method is proposed, which is trained in an end-to-end style. The proposed framework consists of an encoder subnetwork and a decoder subnetwork. The structure of the two subnetworks is symmetric for obtaining better downsampling and upsampling representation. Considering both spectral and spatial information, 3-D all convolution nets and deconvolution nets are used to structure the encoder subnetwork and decoder subnetwork, respectively. However, 3-D convolution and deconvolution kernels bring more parameters, which can deteriorate the quality of the obtained features. To alleviate this problem, a novel cost function with a sparse regular term is designed to obtain more robust feature representation. Experimental results on publicly available datasets indicate that the proposed method can obtain robust and effective features for subsequent classification tasks.