# A Synergistic CNN-Transformer Network with Pooling Attention Fusion for Hyperspectral Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23622/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [SpectralFormer: Rethinking Hyperspectral Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02988/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12861/) (2019)
- [HybridSN: Exploring 3D-2D CNN Feature Hierarchy for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06701/) (2019)
- [Spectral-Spatial Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18401/) (2024)
- [SpectralNET: Exploring Spatial-Spectral WaveletCNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00341/) (2021)
- [FactoFormer: Factorized Hyperspectral Transformers with Self-Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09431/) (2023)
- [WMoE-CLIP: Wavelet-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification task, each pixel is categorized into a specific land-cover category or material. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers have been widely used to extract local and non-local features in HSI classification. Recent works have utilized a multi-scale vision transformer (ViT) to enhance spectral feature capture and yield promising results. However, most existing methods still face challenges in the effective joint use of spatial-spectral information and in preserving information across layers during the propagation process. To address these issues, we propose a synergistic CNN-Transformer network with pooling attention fusion for HSI classification, which collaboratively utilizes CNNs and ViT to process spatial and spectral features separately. Specifically, we propose a Twin-Branch Feature Extraction (TBFE) module, which employs 3D and 2D convolution in parallel to comprehensively extract spectral and spatial features from HSI. A hybrid pooling attention (HPA) module is designed to aggregate spatial attention. Moreover, a cascade transformer encoder is employed for global spectral feature extraction, and a simple yet efficient cross-layer feature fusion (CFF) module is designed to reduce the loss of crucial information in the previous network layers. Extensive experiments are conducted on several representative datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art works. Code is available at https://github.com/chenpeng052/SCT-Net.git.