Lifeboat Foundation

Land cover classification (LCC) of heterogeneous mining areas is important for understanding the influence of mining activities on regional geo-environments. Hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSI) provide spectral information and influence LCC. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) improve the performance of hyperspectral image classification with their powerful feature learning ability. However, if pixel-wise spectra are used as inputs to CNNs, they are ineffective in solving spatial relationships. To address the issue of insufficient spatial information in CNNs, capsule networks adopt a vector to represent position transformation information. Herein, we combine a clustering-based band selection method and residual and capsule networks to create a deep model named ResCapsNet. We tested the robustness of ResCapsNet using Gaofen-5 Imagery. The images covered two heterogeneous study areas in Wuhan City and Xinjiang Province, with spatially weakly dependent and spatially basically independent datasets, respectively. Compared with other methods, the model achieved the best performances, with averaged overall accuracies of 98.45 and 82.80% for Wuhan study area, and 92.82 and 70.88% for Xinjiang study area. Four transfer learning methods were investigated for cross-training and prediction of those two areas and achieved good results. In summary, the proposed model can effectively improve the classification accuracy of HSI in heterogeneous environments.