A Diversified Deep Belief Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

In recent years, researches in remote sensing demonstrated that deep architectures with multiple layers can potentially extract abstract and invariant features for better hyperspectral image classification. Since the usual real-world hyperspectral image classification task cannot provide enough training samples for a supervised deep model, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), this work turns to investigate the deep belief networks (DBNs), which allow unsupervised training. The DBN trained over limited training samples usually has many “dead” (never responding) or “potential over-tolerant” (always responding) latent factors (neurons), which decrease the DBN’s description ability and thus finally decrease the hyperspectral image classification performance. This work proposes a new diversified DBN through introducing a diversity promoting prior over the latent factors during the DBN pre-training and fine-tuning procedures. The diversity promoting prior in the training procedures will encourage the latent factors to be uncorrelated, such that each latent factor focuses on modelling unique information, and all factors will be summed up to capture a large proportion of information and thus increase description ability and classification performance of the diversified DBNs. The proposed method was evaluated over the well-known real-world hyperspectral image dataset. The experiments demonstrate that the diversified DBNs can obtain much better results than original DBNs and comparable or even better performances compared with other recent hyperspectral image classification methods. * Corresponding author