Hyperspectral Image Classification With Mixed Link Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have improved the accuracy of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification significantly. However, CNN models usually generate a large number of feature maps, which lead to high redundancy and cannot guarantee to effectively extract discriminative features for well characterizing the complex structures of HSIs. In this article, two novel mixed link networks (MLNets) are proposed to enhance the representational ability of CNNs for HSI classification. Specifically, the proposed mixed link architectures integrate the feature reusage property of the residual network and the capability of effective new feature exploration of the densely convolutional network, extracting more discriminative features from HSIs. Compared with the dual path architecture, the proposed mixed link architectures can further improve the information flow throughout the network. Experimental results on three hyperspectral benchmark datasets demonstrate that our MLNets achieve competitive results compared with other state-of-the-art HSI classification approaches.