Hyperspectral satellite imaging attracts enormous research attention in the remote sensing community, hence automated approaches for precise segmentation of such imagery are being rapidly developed. In this letter, we share our observations on the strategy for validating hyperspectral image segmentation algorithms currently followed in the literature, and show that it can lead to over-optimistic experimental insights. We introduce a new routine for generating segmentation benchmarks, and use it to elaborate ready-to-use hyperspectral training-test data partitions. They can be utilized for fair validation of new and existing algorithms without any training-test data leakage. ). J. Nalepa, M. Myller, and M. Kawulok are with KP Labs,

Hyperspectral image analysis has become an important topic widely researched by the remote sensing community. Classification and segmentation of such imagery help understand the underlying materials within a scanned scene, since hyperspectral images convey a detailed information captured in a number of spectral bands. Although deep learning has established the state of the art in the field, it still remains challenging to train well-generalizing models due to the lack of ground-truth data. In this letter, we tackle this problem and propose an end-to-end approach to segment hyperspectral images in a fully unsupervised way. We introduce a new deep architecture which couples 3D convolutional autoencoders with clustering. Our multi-faceted experimental study-performed over benchmark and real-life data-revealed that our approach delivers high-quality segmentation without any prior class labels.

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Although hyperspectral images capture very detailed information about the scanned objects, their efficient analysis, transfer, and storage are still important practical challenges due to their large volume. Classifying and segmenting such imagery are the pivotal steps in virtually all applications, hence developing new techniques for these tasks is a vital research area. Here, deep learning has established the current state of the art. However, deploying large-capacity deep models on-board an Earth observation satellite poses additional technological challenges concerned with their memory footprints, energy consumption requirements, and robustness against varying-quality image data, with the last problem being under-researched. In this paper, we tackle this issue, and propose a set of simulation scenarios that reflect a range of atmospheric conditions and noise contamination that may ultimately happen on-board an imaging satellite. We verify their impact on the generalization capabilities of spectral and spectral-spatial convolutional neural networks for hyperspectral image segmentation. Our experimental analysis, coupled with various visualizations, sheds more light on the robustness of the deep models and indicate that specific noise distributions can significantly deteriorate their performance. Additionally, we show that simulating atmospheric conditions is key to obtaining the learners that generalize well over image data acquired in different imaging settings.