Accounting for Spatial Variability with the Histogram of Oriented Gradients Based Masking Improves Performance of Masked Autoencoder over Hyperspectral Satellite Imagery (Student Abstract)

Masked autoencoders employ random masking to effectively reconstruct input images using self-supervised techniques, which allows for efficient training on large datasets. However, the random masking strategy does not adequately tap into information encapsulated within high-dimensional hyperspectral satellite imagery that is used in several domains. We propose a novel masking strategy, HOGMAE, based on the Histogram of Oriented Gradients that incorporates rich information inherent within satellite images during the mask creation step. Our experiments, over a hyperspectral satellite dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology.