Recursive autoencoders based unsupervised feature learning for hyperspectral image classification

For hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, it is very important to learn effective features for the discrimination purpose. Meanwhile, the ability to combine spectral and spatial information together in a deep level is also important for feature learning. In this letter, we propose an unsupervised feature learning method for HSI classification, which is based on recursive autoencoders (RAE) network. RAE utilizes the spatial and spectral information and produces high-level features from the original data. It learns features from the neighborhood of the investigated pixel to represent the whole local homogeneous area of the image. In addition, to obtain more accurate representation of the investigated pixel, a weighting scheme is adopted based on the neighboring pixels, where the weights are determined by the spectral similarity between the neighboring pixels and the investigated pixel. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated by the experiments on two hyperspectral datasets and the results show that our proposed method has better performance.