Boosting Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Classification With Transformer-Based Heterogeneously Salient Graph Representation

Data collected by different modalities can provide a wealth of complementary information, such as hyperspectral image (HSI) to offer rich spectral-spatial properties, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to provide structural information about the Earth's surface, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to cover altitude information about ground elevation. Therefore, a natural idea is to combine multimodal images for refined and accurate land-cover interpretation. Although many efforts have been attempted to achieve multi-source remote sensing image classification, there are still three issues as follows: 1) indiscriminate feature representation without sufficiently considering modal heterogeneity, 2) abundant features and complex computations associated with modeling long-range dependencies, and 3) overfitting phenomenon caused by sparsely labeled samples. To overcome the above barriers, a transformer-based heterogeneously salient graph representation (THSGR) approach is proposed in this paper. First, a multimodal heterogeneous graph encoder is presented to encode distinctively non-Euclidean structural features from heterogeneous data. Then, a self-attention-free multi-convolutional modulator is designed for effective and efficient long-term dependency modeling. Finally, a mean forward strategy is developed in order to avoid overfitting. Based on the above structures, the proposed model is able to break through modal gaps to obtain differentiated graph representation with competitive time cost, even for a small fraction of training samples. Experiments and analyses in three benchmark datasets with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches show the performance of the proposed THSGR. The code will be available in https://github.com/jqyang22.