Hyperspectral image classification based on convolutional neural network and random forest

Deep learning-based methods, especially deep convolutional neural network (CNN), have proven their powerfulness in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. On the other hand, ensemble learning is a useful method for classification task. In this letter, in order to further improve the classification accuracy, the combination of CNN and random forest (RF) is proposed for HSI classification. The well-designed CNN is used as individual classifier to extract the discriminant features of HSI and RF randomly selects the extracted features and training samples to formulate a multiple classifier system. Furthermore, the learned weights of CNN are adopted to initialize other individual CNN. Experimental results with two hyperspectral data sets indicate that the proposed method provides competitive classification results compared with state-of-the-art methods.