Unlocking the Potential of Data Augmentation in Contrastive Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification.

Despite the rapid development of deep learning in hyperspectral image classification (HSIC), most models require a large amount of labeled data, which are both time-consuming and laborious to obtain. However, contrastive learning can extract spatial–spectral features from samples without labels, which helps to solve the above problem. Our focus is on optimizing the contrastive learning process and improving feature extraction from all samples. In this study, we propose the Unlocking-the-Potential-of-Data-Augmentation (UPDA) strategy, which involves adding superior data augmentation methods to enhance the representation of features extracted by contrastive learning. Specifically, we introduce three augmentation methods—band erasure, gradient mask, and random occlusion—to the Bootstrap-Your-Own-Latent (BYOL) structure. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively improve feature representation and thus improve classification accuracy. Additionally, we conduct ablation experiments to explore the effectiveness of different data augmentation methods.