Hyperspectral Image Classification of Brain-Inspired Spiking Neural Network Based on Approximate Derivative Algorithm

Recently, deep learning methods have made significant progress in solving hyperspectral image (HSI) classification problems of high-dimensional features, band redundancy, and spectral mixture. However, the deep neural network is too complex, with a long training time and high energy consumption, making it difficult to deploy on edge computing devices. In order to solve the above problems, this article proposes a brain-inspired computing framework based on the spiking leaky integrate-and-fire neuron model for HSIs’ classification. Then, we design an approximate derivative algorithm to solve the nondifferentiable spike activity of the spiking neuron. The framework uses direct coding to generate spatiotemporal spikes for input HSI and achieves efficient extraction of spatial–spectral features through spiking standard convolution and spiking depthwise separable convolution. Extensive experiments are performed on four benchmark hyperspectral datasets and two public unmanned aerial vehicle-borne hyperspectral datasets. Experiments show that the proposed model has the advantages of high classification accuracy and fewer spiking time steps. The proposed model can save about ten times computational energy consumption compared with the CNN of the same architecture. This research has great significance for overcoming the technical bottleneck of HSI classification based on brain-inspired computing, solving the critical problems of mobile computing in unmanned autonomous systems, and realizing the engineering application of unmanned aerial vehicles and software-defined satellites. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/Katherine-Cao/HSI_SNN .