A Bidirectional Deep-Learning-Based Spectral Attention Mechanism for Hyperspectral Data Classification

Hyperspectral remote sensing presents a unique big data research paradigm through its rich information captured across hundreds of spectral bands, which embodies vital spatial and temporal information about the underlying land cover. Deep-learning-based hyperspectral data analysis methodologies have made significant advancements over the past few years. Despite their success, most deep learning frameworks for hyperspectral data classification tend to suffer in terms of computational and classification efficacy as the data size increases. This is largely due to their equal emphasis criteria on the rich spectral information present in the data, albeit all of the spectral information not being essential for hyperspectral data analysis. On the contrary, this redundant information present in the spectral bands can deter the performance of hyperspectral data analysis techniques. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel bidirectional spectral attention mechanism, which is computationally efficient and capable of adaptive spectral information diversification through selective emphasis on spectral bands that comprise more information and suppress the ones with lesser information. The concept of 3D-convolutions in tandem with bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) is used in the proposed architecture as spectral attention mechanism. A feedforward neural network (FNN)-based supervised classification is then performed to validate the performance of our proposed approach. Experimental results reveal that the proposed hyperspectral data analysis model with spectral attention mechanism outperforms other spatial- and spectral-information-extraction-based hyperspectral data analysis techniques compared.