Band Selection from Hyperspectral Images Using Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract--This paper introduces new attention-based convolutional neural networks for selecting bands from hyperspectral images. The proposed approach reuses convolutional activations at different depths, identifying the most informative regions of the spectrum with the help of gating mechanisms. Our attention techniques are modular and easy to implement, and they can be seamlessly trained end-to-end using gradient descent. Our rigorous experiments showed that deep models equipped with the attention mechanism deliver high-quality classification, and repeatedly identify significant bands in the training data, permitting the creation of refined and extremely compact sets that retain the most meaningful features. Hyperspectral data's high dimensionality is an important challenge towards its accurate segmentation, efficient analysis, transfer and storage.