MambaOutRS: A Hybrid CNN-Fourier Architecture for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning for vision tasks have seen the rise of State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba, celebrated for their linear scalability. However, their adaptation to 2D visual data often necessitates complex modifications that may diminish efficiency. In this paper, we introduce MambaOutRS, a novel hybrid convolutional architecture for remote sensing image classification that re-evaluates the necessity of recurrent SSMs. MambaOutRS builds upon stacked Gated CNN blocks for local feature extraction and introduces a novel Fourier Filter Gate (FFG) module that operates in the frequency domain to capture global contextual information efficiently. Our architecture employs a four-stage hierarchical design and was extensively evaluated on challenging remote sensing datasets: UC Merced, AID, NWPU-RESISC45, and EuroSAT. MambaOutRS consistently achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across these benchmarks. Notably, our MambaOutRS-t variant (24.0M parameters) attained the highest F1-scores of 98.41\% on UC Merced and 95.99\% on AID, significantly outperforming existing baselines, including larger transformer models and Mamba-based architectures, despite using considerably fewer parameters. An ablation study conclusively demonstrates the critical role of the Fourier Filter Gate in enhancing the model's ability to capture global spatial patterns, leading to robust and accurate classification. These results strongly suggest that the complexities of recurrent SSMs can be effectively superseded by a judicious combination of gated convolutions for spatial mixing and frequency-based gates for spectral global context. Thus, MambaOutRS provides a compelling and efficient paradigm for developing high-performance deep learning models in remote sensing and other vision domains, particularly where computational efficiency is paramount.