Spectral–Spatial Features Exploitation Using Lightweight HResNeXt Model for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Abstract

Hyperspectral image classification is vital for various remote sensing applications; however, it remains challenging due to the complex and high-dimensional nature of hyperspectral data. This paper introduces a novel approach to address this challenge by leveraging spectral and spatial features through a lightweight HResNeXt model. The proposed model is designed to overcome the limitations of traditional methods by combining residual connections and cardinality to enable efficient and effective feature extraction from hyperspectral images, capturing both spectral and spatial information simultaneously. Furthermore, the paper includes an in-depth analysis of the learned spectral–spatial features, providing valuable insights into the discriminative power of the proposed approach. The extracted features exhibit strong discriminative capabilities, enabling accurate classification even in challenging scenarios with limited training samples and complex spectral variations. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on four benchmark hyperspectral data sets, the Pavia university (PU), Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Salinas scene (SA), and Indian Pines (IP). The performance of the proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The quantitative and visual results demonstrate the proposed approach’s high classification accuracy, noise robustness, and computational efficiency superiority. The HResNeXt obtained an overall accuracy on PU, KSC, SA, and IP, 99.46%, 81.46%, 99.75%, and 98.64%, respectively. Notably, the lightweight HResNeXt model achieves competitive results while requiring fewer computational resources, making it well-suited for real-time applications.