With the rapid advancement of remote-sensing technology, the spectral information obtained from hyperspectral remote-sensing imagery has become increasingly rich, facilitating detailed spectral analysis of Earth’s surface objects. However, the abundance of spectral information presents certain challenges for data processing, such as the “curse of dimensionality” leading to the “Hughes phenomenon”, “strong correlation” due to high resolution, and “nonlinear characteristics” caused by varying surface reflectances. Consequently, dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral data emerges as a critical task. This paper begins by elucidating the principles and processes of hyperspectral image dimensionality reduction based on manifold theory and learning methods, in light of the nonlinear structures and features present in hyperspectral remote-sensing data, and formulates a dimensionality reduction process based on manifold learning. Subsequently, this study explores the capabilities of feature extraction and low-dimensional embedding for hyperspectral imagery using manifold learning approaches, including principal components analysis (PCA), multidimensional scaling (MDS), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for linear methods; and isometric mapping (Isomap), locally linear embedding (LLE), Laplacian eigenmaps (LE), Hessian locally linear embedding (HLLE), local tangent space alignment (LTSA), and maximum variance unfolding (MVU) for nonlinear methods, based on the Indian Pines hyperspectral dataset and Pavia University dataset. Furthermore, the paper investigates the optimal neighborhood computation time and overall algorithm runtime for feature extraction in hyperspectral imagery, varying by the choice of neighborhood k and intrinsic dimensionality d values across different manifold learning methods. Based on the outcomes of feature extraction, the study examines the classification experiments of various manifold learning methods, comparing and analyzing the variations in classification accuracy and Kappa coefficient with different selections of neighborhood k and intrinsic dimensionality d values. Building on this, the impact of selecting different bandwidths t for the Gaussian kernel in the LE method and different Lagrange multipliers λ for the MVU method on classification accuracy, given varying choices of neighborhood k and intrinsic dimensionality d, is explored. Through these experiments, the paper investigates the capability and effectiveness of different manifold learning methods in feature extraction and dimensionality reduction within hyperspectral imagery, as influenced by the selection of neighborhood k and intrinsic dimensionality d values, identifying the optimal neighborhood k and intrinsic dimensionality d value for each method. A comparison of classification accuracies reveals that the LTSA method yields superior classification results compared to other manifold learning approaches. The study demonstrates the advantages of manifold learning methods in processing hyperspectral image data, providing an experimental reference for subsequent research on hyperspectral image dimensionality reduction using manifold learning methods.