EMAP-DCNN: A NOVEL MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY AND DEEP LEARNING COMBINED FRAMEWORK FOR HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION

Abstract. The classification of hyperspectral image (HSI) with high spectral and spatial resolution represents an important and challenging task in image processing and remote sensing (RS) domains due to the problem of computational complexity and big dimensionality of the remote sensing images. The spatial and spectral pixel characteristics have crucial significance for hyperspectral image classification and to take into account these two types of characteristics, various classification and feature extraction methods have been developed to improve spectral-spatial classification of remote sensing images for thematic mapping purposes such as agricultural mapping, urban mapping, emergency mapping in case of natural disasters... In recent years, mathematical morphology and deep learning (DL) have been recognized as prominent feature extraction techniques that led to remarkable spectral-spatial classification performances. Among them, Extended Multi-Attribute Profiles (EMAP) and Dense Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) are considered as robust and powerful approaches such as the work in this paper is based on these two techniques for the feature extraction stage and used in two combined manners and constructing the EMAP-DCNN frame. The experiments were conducted on two popular datasets: “Indian Pines” and “Huston” hyperspectral datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the two proposed approaches of the EMAP-DCNN frame denoted EMAP-DCNN 1, EMAP-DCNN 2 provide competitive performances compared with some state-of-the-art spectral-spatial classification methods based on deep learning.