SPNet: Spectral Patching End-to-End Classification Network for UAV-Borne Hyperspectral Imagery With High Spatial and Spectral Resolutions

In deep learning (DL)-based hyperspectral imagery classification, “spatial patching” is primarily used as a preprocessing for incorporating local spatial information. This operation can help to promote classification accuracy but it is facing new challenges in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne hyperspectral imagery with high spatial and spectral resolutions (H² imagery). The ground objects’ various spatial scales result in it being challenging to determine the optimal size for the spatial patches. In addition, due to the severe spectral variability and spatial heterogeneity of the H² imagery, “spatial patching” only exploits the local spatial information and results in serious salt-and-pepper (SP) noise and isolated areas in the classification maps. In this article, to address these issues, a novel spectral patching network (SPNet) with an end-to-end DL architecture is proposed for UAV-borne H² imagery classification. The “spectral patching” approach is proposed to preserve the global spatial information and almost all the spectral information of the original hyperspectral imagery. An end-to-end deep encoder–decoder network is then constructed based on the spectral patching mechanism, which introduces the deep residual network (ResNet) and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) modules to extract multiscale high-level semantic information for the H² imagery classification. The experimental results obtained with the Wuhan UAV-borne H² imagery (WHU-Hi) UAV-borne hyperspectral data set demonstrate that SPNet can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and visualization performance in the classification of H² imagery.