MADANet: A Lightweight Hyperspectral Image Classification Network with Multiscale Feature Aggregation and a Dual Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Hyperspectral remote sensing images, with their continuous, narrow, and rich spectra, hold distinct significance in the precise classification of land cover. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and their variants are increasingly utilized for hyperspectral classification, but solving the conflict between the number of model parameters, performance, and accuracy has become a pressing challenge. To alleviate this problem, we propose MADANet, a lightweight hyperspectral image classification network that combines multiscale feature aggregation and a dual attention mechanism. By employing depthwise separable convolution, multiscale features can be extracted and aggregated to capture local contextual information effectively. Simultaneously, the dual attention mechanism harnesses both channel and spatial dimensions to acquire comprehensive global semantic information. Ultimately, techniques such as global average pooling (GAP) and full connection (FC) are employed to integrate local contextual information with global semantic knowledge, thereby enabling the accurate classification of hyperspectral pixels. The results from the experiments conducted on representative hyperspectral images demonstrate that MADANet not only attains the highest classification accuracy but also maintains significantly fewer parameters compared to the other methods. Experimental results show that our proposed framework significantly reduces the number of model parameters while still achieving the highest classification accuracy. As an example, the model has only 0.16 M model parameters in the Indian Pines (IP) dataset, but the overall accuracy is as high as 98.34%. Similarly, the framework achieves an overall accuracy of 99.13%, 99.17%, and 99.08% on the University of Pavia (PU), Salinas (SA), and WHU Hi LongKou (LongKou) datasets, respectively. This result exceeds the classification accuracy of existing state-of-the-art frameworks under the same conditions.