Substantial deep learning methods have been utilized for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification recently. Vision Transformer (ViT) is skilled in modeling the overall structure of images and has been introduced to HSI classification task. However, the fixed patch division operation in ViT may lead to insufficient feature extraction, especially the features of the edges between patches will be ignored. To address this problem, we devise a workflow for HSI classification based on the Nested Transformers (NesT). The NesT employs the block aggregation module to extract edge information between patches, which realizes cross-block communication of nonlocal information and optimizes global information extraction. In this paper, the NesT is used for HSI classification for the first time. The experiments are carried out on four widely used hyperspectral datasets: Indian Pines, Salinas, Tea Farm, and Xiongan New Area (Matiwan Village). The obtained results reveal that the NesT can provide competitive results compared to conventional machine learning and deep learning methods and achieve top accuracy on four datasets, which proves the superiority of the NesT in HSI classification with limited training samples.

Pixel-wise classification of hyperspectral image (HSI) is a hot spot in the field of remote sensing. The classification of HSI requires the model to be more sensitive to dense features, which is quite different from the modelling requirements of traditional image classification tasks. Cycle-Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) has achieved satisfactory results in dense feature prediction tasks because it is an expert in extracting high-resolution features. In order to obtain a more stable receptive field and enhance the effect of feature extraction in multiple directions, we propose an MLP-like model called DriftNet for HSI classification inspired by Cycle-MLP and deformable convolution. Besides, the proposed DriftNet uses a unique ladder-like fully connected structure to achieve progressive activation of neurons and facilitates the fusion of spatial and spectral information, thereby obtaining more sensitive location information for better classification results. Experimental results on three public hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalisation of DriftNet. K E Y W O R D S cycleMLP, classification of hyperspectral image, deep learning, driftFCThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

High‐performance convolutional neural networks (CNNs) stack many convolutional layers to obtain powerful feature extraction capability, which leads to huge storing and computational costs. The authors focus on lightweight models for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, so a novel lightweight criss‐cross large kernel convolutional neural network (LiteCCLKNet) is proposed. Specifically, a lightweight module containing two 1D convolutions with self‐attention mechanisms in orthogonal directions is presented. By setting large kernels within the 1D convolutional layers, the proposed module can efficiently aggregate long‐range contextual features. In addition, the authors effectively obtain a global receptive field by stacking only two of the proposed modules. Compared with traditional lightweight CNNs, LiteCCLKNet reduces the number of parameters for easy deployment to resource‐limited platforms. Experimental results on three HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed LiteCCLKNet outperforms the previous lightweight CNNs and has higher storage efficiency.