Ten Architectures, One Error: Shared Failure Modes in Hyperspectral Classification under Spatially Disjoint Evaluation
Ehsan Faghih, Fatemeh Ashrafi, Marguerite Moore, Zahra Saki
Abstract
Hyperspectral image classification still relies heavily on random pixel splits within a single scene. The Salinas dataset, randomly split, is among the most widely used datasets for comparing different architectures. However, under a random split method, a large fraction of test pixels fall immediately adjacent to a training pixel, which inflates reported accuracy. This work introduces a leakage-free evaluation protocol linking spatial separation to the model's receptive field. Applying this protocol across ten different architectures, including classical, spectral, spectral-spatial, transformer, vision-backbone, and state-space families, shows that Macro-F1 drops by 0.147 on average and model rankings change by as many as five places. Furthermore, leakage-free evaluation limits which architectures can be tested on a given benchmark. Since each partition supports patches only within a finite radius, reporting this radius alongside the receptive field is essential for fair comparison. In addition, this study reveals that all ten architectures misclassify largely the same pixels, pointing to a spectral ambiguity in the data that none of them resolves.