Combining t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding with Convolutional Neural Networks for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral images (HSIs), featured by high spectral resolution over a wide range of electromagnetic spectra, have been widely used to characterize materials with subtle differences in the spectral domain. However, a large number of bands and an insufficient number of sample pixels for each class are challenging for traditional machine learning-based classifiers. As alternative tools for feature extraction, neural networks have received extensive attention. This letter proposes to combine t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) with a convolutional neural network (CNN) for HSI classification. Our framework is designed to automatically capture the potential assembly features, which are extracted from both the dimension-reduced CNN (DR-CNN) and the multiscale-CNN. Experimental results show that the proposed classification framework outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques for three real data sets.