Grafting Transformer on Automatically Designed Convolutional Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been a hot topic for decides, as HSIs have rich spatial and spectral information, and provide a strong basis for distinguishing different land-cover objects. Benefiting from the development of deep learning technologies, deep learning-based HSI classification methods have achieved promising performance. Recently, several neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms have been proposed for HSI classification, which further improves the accuracy of HSI classification to a new level. In this article, NAS and transformer are combined for handling the HSI classification task for the first time. Compared with the previous work, the proposed method has two main differences. First, we revisit the search spaces designed in previous HSI classification NAS methods and propose a novel hybrid search space, consisting of the space-dominated cell and the spectrum-dominated cell. Compared with search spaces proposed in previous works, the proposed hybrid search space is more aligned with the characteristic of HSI data, that is, HSIs have a relatively low spatial resolution and an extremely high spectral resolution. Second, to further improve the classification accuracy, we attempt to graft the emerging transformer module on the automatically designed convolutional neural network (CNN) to add global information to local region focused features learned by CNN. Experimental results on three public HSI datasets show that the proposed method achieves much better performance than comparison approaches, including manually designed networks and NAS-based HSI classification methods. Especially on the most recently captured dataset Houston University, overall accuracy is improved by nearly 6 percentage points. Code is available at https://github.com/Cecilia-xue/HyT-NAS.