Feature Extraction Using Multitask Superpixel Auxiliary Learning for Hyperspectral Classification

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain many levels of spatial structures, and thus, feature extraction techniques have been broadly studied in hyperspectral data processing to mine its structural information while preserving strong edge details. However, spatial characteristics in different scales unavoidably mix and overlap, which makes separation among pixels very difficult and yields misclassification. This article proposes a feature extraction method by using multitask superpixel-based auxiliary learning (MSAL) that consists of two main stages. We first design a novel multitask learning (MTL) model from the perspective of task input by constructing a set of auxiliary feature cubes as inputs. Under the MTL framework, the spatial information and edge information are refined in the superpixel-based auxiliary learning feature extraction stage. Specifically, the auxiliary rolling guidance features are extracted from auxiliary cubes via rolling guidance filter, which can remove the unwanted structure. Then, the spatial feature within superpixels is refined by applying structure density-based weighted operation, and the edge feature is stacked with the superpixel auxiliary features to supply the edge information. Finally, the obtained feature cubes are fed into a pixelwise classifier, and a weighted decision rule is introduced to optimize the initial results by utilizing the inherent relation between auxiliary cubes. Experimental results demonstrate that the MSAL can significantly improve the quality of the extraction feature and outperform other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of classification accuracies.