HSLiNets: Evaluating Band Ordering Strategies in Hyperspectral and LiDAR Fusion

The integration of hyperspectral image (HSI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data provides complementary spectral and spatial information for remote sensing applications. While previous studies have explored the role of band selection and grouping in HSI classification, little attention has been given to how the spectral sequence—or band order—affects classification outcomes when fused with LiDAR. In this letter, we systematically investigate the influence of band order on HSI-LiDAR fusion performance. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that band order significantly impacts classification accuracy, revealing a previously overlooked factor in fusion-based models. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel fusion architecture that not only integrates HSI and LiDAR data but also learns from multiple band order configurations. The proposed method enhances feature representation by adaptively fusing different spectral sequences, leading to improved classification accuracy. Experimental results on the Houston 2013 and Trento datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art fusion models. Supplementary material and code are available at HSLiNets.