Class incremental learning with analytic learning for hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) is crucial for applications in agriculture and environmental monitoring. As ground objects evolve and remote sensing technology progresses, there is a growing need for HSIC models that can adapt to new data classes without requiring to be retrained from scratch. Throughout the continual learning procedure, the model is expected to not only effectively extract spatial–spectral features from the hyperspectral image but also alleviate the issue of catastrophic forgetting, i.e., the model forgets the learned classes’ knowledge when accessing novel classes during the training process. In this paper, for the HSIC task, we propose a class incremental learning method (HSI-CIL) that is based on analytic learning, a technique that converts network training into linear problems. Specifically, The HSI-CIL model consists of a lightweight feature extractor, a Feature Processing Module (FPM) and an Analytic Linear Classifier (ALC). This model does not need data storage for old and new classes and has only one epoch in the incremental learning stage, so it has lower consumption of resources and training time than several attempts have been proposed for addressing catastrophic forgetting. We perform abundant experiments with the proposed HSI-CIL on three publicly available hyperspectral datasets including Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas. The experiments demonstrate that our HSI-CIL exceeds the state-of-the-art class incremental learning (CIL) techniques applied in HSIC with a certain gap.