Spatial–spectral morphological mamba for hyperspectral image classification

Recent advancements in transformers, specifically self-attention mechanisms, have significantly improved hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, these models often have inefficiencies, as their computational complexity scales quadratically with sequence length. To address these challenges, we propose the morphological spatial mamba (SMM) and morphological spatial–spectral Mamba (SSMM) model (MorpMamba), which combines the strengths of morphological operations and the state space model framework, offering a more computationally efficient alternative to transformers. In MorpMamba, a novel token generation module first converts HSI patches into spatial–spectral tokens. These tokens are then processed through morphological operations such as erosion and dilation, utilizing depthwise separable convolutions to capture structural and shape information. A token enhancement module refines these features by dynamically adjusting the spatial and spectral tokens based on central HSI regions, ensuring effective feature fusion within each block. Subsequently, multi-head self-attention is applied to enrich the feature representations further, allowing the model to capture complex relationships and dependencies within the data. Finally, the enhanced tokens are fed into a state space module, which efficiently models the temporal evolution of the features for classification. Experimental results on widely used HSI datasets demonstrate that MorpMamba achieves superior parametric efficiency compared to traditional CNN and transformer models while maintaining high accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/mahmad000/MorpMamba.