Hybrid CNN-GCN Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been impressive due to their excellent feature representation abilities, but it is difficult to learn long-distance spatial structures information. Unlike CNN, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) can well handle the intrinsic manifold structures of hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, the existing GCN-based classification methods do not fully utilize the edge relationship, which makes their performance is limited. In addition, a small number of training samples is also a reason for hindering high-performance HSI classification. Therefore, this article proposes a hybrid CNN-GCN network (HCGN) for HSI classification. First, a graph edge enhanced module (GEEM) is designed to enhance the superpixel-level features of graph edge nodes and improve the spatial discrimination ability of ground objects. In particular, considering multiscale information is complementary, a multiscale GEEM based on GEEM is proposed to fully utilize texture structures of different sizes. Then, in order to enhance the pixel-level multi hierarchical fine feature representation of images, a multiscale cross fusion module based on the CNN framework is proposed. Finally, the extracted pixel-level features and superpixel-level features are cascaded. Through a series of experiments, it has been proved that compared with some state-of-the-art methods, HCGN combines the advantages of CNN and GCN frameworks, can provide superior classification performance under limited training samples, and demonstrates the advantages and great potential of HCGN.