Hyperspectral image classification with token fusion on GPU

Hyperspectral images capture material nuances with spectral data, vital for remote sensing. Transformer has become a mainstream approach for tackling the challenges posed by high-dimensional hyperspectral data with complex structures. However, a major challenge they face when processing hyperspectral images is the presence of a large number of redundant tokens, which leads to a significant increase in computational load, adding to the model’s computational burden and affecting inference speed. Therefore, we propose a token fusion algorithm tailored to the operational characteristics of the hyperspectral image and pure transformer network, aimed at enhancing the final accuracy and throughput of the model. The token fusion algorithm introduces a token merging step between the attention mechanism and the multi-layer perceptron module in each Transformer layer. Experiments on four hyperspectral image datasets demonstrate that our token fusion algorithm can significantly improve inference speed without any training, while only causing a slight decrease in the pure transformer network’s classification accuracy.