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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-279-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>SpectralNet-X: Transformer-based Lossy Compression for Hyperspectral Satellite Data</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sheikh</surname>
<given-names>Jannik</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Kuester</surname>
<given-names>Jannick</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Gross</surname>
<given-names>Wolfgang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Michel</surname>
<given-names>Andreas</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Weinmann</surname>
<given-names>Martin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Fraunhofer IOSB, Image Analysis Group, Ettlingen, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Institut für Photogrammetrie und Fernerkundung, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>08</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-3-2026</volume>
<fpage>279</fpage>
<lpage>288</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jannik Sheikh et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/279/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-279-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/279/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-279-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/279/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-279-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/279/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-279-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Hyperspectral satellite missions generate massive data volumes that are difficult to transmit and store, making effective lossy compression a key enabling technology. We propose SpectralNet-X, a transformer-based autoencoder for spectral-only compression of spaceborne hyperspectral imagery at a fixed compression ratio of 16. The encoder maps each spectrum to a low-dimensional latent code using a 1D convolutional projection followed by stacked self-attention layers with rotary position embeddings and cross-attention pooling. The decoder reconstructs full-band spectra through an upsampling stack and per-band affine calibration. To improve reconstruction fidelity and generalization, SpectralNet-X is first pretrained via masked-signal reconstruction inspired by SimMIM and then fine-tuned with a mixed objective combining mean-squared error and spectral angle mapper (SAM) terms using a scheduled weighting scheme. We evaluate SpectralNet-X on the large-scale HySpecNet&amp;ndash;11k benchmark and in a cross-sensor transfer setting, where models trained on HySpecNet&amp;ndash;11k are tested on PRISMA hyperspectral scenes. Compared to three compression autoencoders, SpectralNet-X achieves the lowest angular reconstruction errors while maintaining competitive distortion metrics and substantially reducing the fraction of spectra with large SAM outliers. This study evaluates learned spectral compression under a normalized post-correction setting rather than in an end-to-end operational onboard radiance-preservation pipeline. The experiments rely on L2A and radiometrically corrected products rather than raw at-sensor radiances, so narrow atmospheric absorption features and residual Fraunhofer-line effects are not represented as in a true onboard scenario. The presented results should therefore be interpreted as evidence for learned spectral reconstruction under a controlled post-correction setting, not yet as direct validation for operational onboard deployment.</p>
</abstract>
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