Unveiling the Power of Wavelets: A Wavelet-based Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification is a crucial but challenging task due to the high dimensionality and complex spatial-spectral correlations inherent in hyperspectral data. This paper employs Wavelet-based Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (wav-kan) architecture tailored for efficient modeling of these intricate dependencies. Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, Wav-KAN incorporates wavelet functions as learnable activation functions, enabling non-linear mapping of the input spectral signatures. The wavelet-based activation allows Wav-KAN to effectively capture multi-scale spatial and spectral patterns through dilations and translations. Experimental evaluation on three benchmark hyperspectral datasets (Salinas, Pavia, Indian Pines) demonstrates the superior performance of Wav-KAN compared to traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and the recently proposed Spline-based KAN (Spline-KAN) model. In this work we are: (1) conducting more experiments on additional hyperspectral datasets (Pavia University, WHU-Hi, and Urban Hyperspectral Image) to further validate the generalizability of Wav-KAN; (2) developing a multiresolution Wav-KAN architecture to capture scale-invariant features; (3) analyzing the effect of dimensional reduction techniques on classification performance; (4) exploring optimization methods for tuning the hyperparameters of KAN models; and (5) comparing Wav-KAN with other state-of-the-art models in hyperspectral image classification.