Seed-to-Semantics: Few-Shot Prototype-Guided Progressive Learning for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Classification

Deep learning-based fusion of hyperspectral images (HSI) and LiDAR has achieved strong performance in multimodal remote sensing classification, but its success is heavily constrained by the high cost of pixel-wise annotation. In extremely label-scarce regimes, such as 2-5 labeled samples per class, conventional deep models are prone to severe overfitting, while standard semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods often suffer from confirmation bias because pseudo-labels are generated from unstable early-stage representations. To address these challenges, we propose Prototype-Guided Progressive Learning (PGPL), a unified framework for few-shot HSI-LiDAR classification. Instead of relying solely on model confidence in latent space, PGPL first constructs a reliable initialization pool directly in the original data domain using spectral-angle and elevation-consistency cues, and then progressively expands the training set through class-balanced pseudo-label admission and temporal confidence stabilization. In this way, the framework improves pseudo-label reliability during both initialization and subsequent self-training. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that PGPL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised baselines under the corresponding 2-5-shot settings, achieving overall accuracy gains of 4.64% points on Houston, 1.16% on Trento, and 3.92% on MUUFL over the strongest competing methods, while also yielding higher pseudo-label purity. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhangyiyan001/PGPL.