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Few-Sample Intelligence for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification

A Special Issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292) belonging to the section "Remote Sensing Image Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2027 | Viewed by 1619

Editors


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Guest Editor
College of Information Science and Engineering, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou 450001, China
Interests: machine learning; remote sensing image processing; spectral imaging non-destructive detection
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Guest Editor
The School of Geo-Science & Technology, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China
Interests: remote sensing big data processing; machine learning; data mining; artificial intelligence

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China
Interests: image classification; feature extraction; machine learning; object detection

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Hyperspectral remote sensing imagery, characterized by its contiguous and narrow spectral bands, provides an unparalleled data source for the precise identification and classification of ground targets. However, its high dimensionality and the fundamental scarcity of labeled training samples severely limit its practical application. While artificial intelligence techniques with deep learning, as a typical example, have revolutionized hyperspectral image analysis, their success often depends on large annotated datasets that are costly and time-consuming to acquire in hyperspectral remote sensing. This challenge has catalyzed the emergence of few-sample intelligence—a dedicated research frontier focused on developing AI models that learn effectively from minimal labeled data. Techniques such as meta-learning, generative data augmentation, and self-supervised pre-training are pushing the boundaries of what is achievable with limited supervision. Advancing few-sample intelligence is critical for unlocking the operational potential of hyperspectral technology across scientific and commercial applications where annotation resources are constrained.

This Special Issue aims to compile cutting-edge research on AI methods specifically designed for few-sample intelligence for hyperspectral image classification. Topics of interest span all aspects of this domain, from novel algorithms that improve labeled sample efficiency and generalization, to innovative strategies for leveraging unlabeled or auxiliary data, and rigorous evaluations in real-world scenarios. This issue particularly encourages submissions addressing challenges such as cross-domain few-shot adaptation, uncertainty-aware learning with small data, and the integration of physical models or knowledge to guide few-sample learning. Its focus directly is directly aligned with the journal’s aim of publishing significant research on the science and application of remote sensing technology.

Articles may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • Few-shot and zero-shot learning;
  • Meta-learning and active learning;
  • Semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning;
  • Transfer learning and domain adaptation;
  • Self-supervised and unsupervised pre-training;
  • Lightweight and efficient networks for small data;
  • Generative models for spectral–spatial data augmentation;
  • Multi-modal fusion with limited samples;
  • Sample uncertainty quantification in classification;
  • Few-sample classification for fine-grained agriculture, geology, and urban monitoring.

Research articles and review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Prof. Dr. Fulin Luo
Prof. Dr. Yule Duan
Prof. Dr. Xiaohui He
Dr. Guangyao Shi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • hyperspectral image classification
  • few-sample classification
  • semi-supervised classification
  • few-shot learning
  • self-supervised training
  • cross-scene transfer learning
  • multi-modal fusion classification
  • fine-grained land cover mapping
  • lightweight models

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 10423 KB  
Article
Cloud-Aware Dual-Path Prompt Learning with CLIP for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Ship Classification in Mixed-Sky Remote Sensing Imagery
by Yiping Song, Liang Huang, He Yang and Shuo Li
Remote Sens. 2026, 18(11), 1815; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18111815 - 2 Jun 2026
Viewed by 352
Abstract
Few-shot remote-sensing fine-grained ship classification (RS-FGSC) faces two coupled challenges: limited annotated samples and mixed-visibility imaging conditions caused by cloud occlusion. Although CLIP-based prompt learning provides useful transfer priors, conventional single-branch adaptation can encounter an over-correction dilemma: robust compensation applied globally may degrade [...] Read more.
Few-shot remote-sensing fine-grained ship classification (RS-FGSC) faces two coupled challenges: limited annotated samples and mixed-visibility imaging conditions caused by cloud occlusion. Although CLIP-based prompt learning provides useful transfer priors, conventional single-branch adaptation can encounter an over-correction dilemma: robust compensation applied globally may degrade clear samples, whereas clear-image optimization may fail on occluded samples. We propose CADP (Cloud-Aware Dual-Path Prompt Learning), which decouples clear and occluded processing through learnable routing. CADP contains three components: (1) a cloud detector (CloudDetector) trained with auxiliary cloud-state labels for instance-level routing, (2) a fine-grained adapter (FineGrainedAdapter) that preserves discriminative details for clear samples, and (3) a robust compensation path using occlusion-aware prompting (AOPD) from CARP for occluded samples. To evaluate mixed-visibility scenarios, we construct Mixed-Sky benchmarks by combining clear ship images with SeaCloud-Ship cloud-occluded samples introduced by CARP, using controlled cloud-mixed ratios (25%, 50%, and 75%) and a non-overlapping sampling strategy. Experiments from 1-shot to 16-shot show consistent gains over CoCoOp, CLIP-Adapter, and prior robust prompting methods. CADP achieves 35.49% average accuracy, improving the best-performing baseline in our protocol by +4.81 points (+15.7% relative improvement). Component ablations, routing controls, and attention visualizations indicate that explicit routing reduces negative transfer between clear and occluded samples. Full article
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25 pages, 11923 KB  
Article
CADR-BL: Class-Adaptive Dictionary Reconstruction with Broad Learning for Few-Shot Hyperspectral Image Classification
by Ziwei Li, Jiali Guo, Weizhen Zhang, Mengya Han, Zhenqiang Xu, Baowei Zhang, Ning Li, Weiran Luo, Menglei Xie and Jianzhong Guo
Remote Sens. 2026, 18(9), 1263; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18091263 - 22 Apr 2026
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 531
Abstract
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification in few-shot scenarios faces two core challenges. Limited samples and high spectral similarity lead to insufficient inter-class feature discriminability, and commonly used deep models suffer from the risk of overfitting. To address these problems, this paper proposes a Class-Adaptive [...] Read more.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification in few-shot scenarios faces two core challenges. Limited samples and high spectral similarity lead to insufficient inter-class feature discriminability, and commonly used deep models suffer from the risk of overfitting. To address these problems, this paper proposes a Class-Adaptive Dictionary Reconstruction with Broad Learning (CADR-BL) method. Specifically, the method constructs an exclusive adaptive dictionary for each category and adopts an alternating minimization strategy to achieve sparse reconstruction of intra-class pixels, thereby enhancing intra-class spectral consistency and suppressing inter-class interference. On this basis, an improved Hyperspectral Broad Learning (HS-BL) model is introduced to efficiently classify the reconstructed features. Random feature mapping and closed-form solutions of output weights are utilized to alleviate overfitting in few-shot learning. Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets, namely Indian Pines, Salinas, and WHU-Hi-HanChuan, show that CADR-BL outperforms several mainstream few-shot classification methods in terms of overall accuracy, average accuracy, and Kappa coefficient. Notably, CADR-BL maintains robust performance even with extremely limited training samples, and is less sensitive to variations in sample size than other comparative methods, demonstrating strong generalization ability. The proposed method provides a reliable technical reference for few-shot HSI classification in applications such as precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and resource exploration. Full article
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