Deep mixed precision for hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) record scenes at different wavelength channels, providing detailed spatial and spectral information. How to storage and process this high-dimensional data plays a vital role in many practical applications, where classification technologies have emerged as excellent processing tools. However, their high computational complexity and energy requirements bring some challenges. Adopting low-power consumption architectures and deep learning (DL) approaches has to provide acceptable computing capabilities without reducing accuracy demand. However, most DL architectures employ single-precision (FP32) to train models, and some big DL architectures will have a limitation on memory and computation resources. This can negatively affect the network learning process. This letter leads these challenges by using mixed precision into DL architectures for HSI classification to speed up the training process and reduce the memory consumption/access. Proposed models are evaluated on four widely used data sets. Also, low and high-power consumption devices are compared, considering NVIDIA Jetson Xavier and Titan RTX GPUs, to evaluate the proposal viability in on-board processing devices. Obtained results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of these models within HSI classification task for both devices. Source codes: https://github.com/mhaut/CNN-MP-HSI .