A Hierarchical Semantic Consistency Constraint Framework for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Joint Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) and LiDAR data fusion is valuable for land-cover classification in complex surface scenes. Existing methods typically extract features from each modality independently and then consider how to fuse them, ignoring the semantic consistency between features of different modalities and across different hierarchical levels. Moreover, fully mining and exploiting the complementary information between multimodal remote sensing data remains a critical issue. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hierarchical semantic consistency constraint (HSCC) framework for HSI and LiDAR data joint classification. The framework is co-constructed by a progressive interactive fusion network (PIFNet) and a semantic consistency constraint (SCC) strategy. Specifically, PIFNet progressively calibrates the semantic representations of multimodal features at different abstraction levels through Cross-Modal Shared Attention and Symmetric Cross-Attention mechanisms, promoting information parity in deep interactions. The SCC strategy establishes multi-level semantic associations and employs a semantic consistency constraint loss to guide the network to autonomously maintain the consistency of the same land-cover object across heterogeneous feature representations, thereby further enhancing the discriminative power of the fused features. Experiments on three public datasets, MUUFL, Houston2013, and Augsburg, demonstrate that HSCC outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in multi-source remote sensing data fusion classification tasks.