<p>Recent research on Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) has been much concerned with small sample size due to the challenges of obtaining large labeled data. Coupled with this is the challenge with optimization of the models’ structure and computational complexities. Meta-learning techniques have been proposed to improve classification accuracy on small training data samples. The existing meta-learning techniques still require several pre-collected labeled hyperspectral images (HSI) source datasets of large labeled samples for meta-training, which is undoubtedly a huge task and time-consuming. We propose a meta-learning with orthogonal softmax layer (MLOSL) for small sample HSIC. Orthogonality is introduced to address the structural and computational complexities of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models for HSIC. An unsupervised meta-learning task construction extracts multiview spectral dimension features of different bands from the same sample, whereas the spatial dimension multiview features are extracted through data augmentation. The orthogonal softmax layer captures a wider variety of patterns in the data by promoting variation among the weight vectors, potentially improving generalization to unobserved samples and minimizing computational time. Label smoothing is added to the classification loss to lessen the impact of incorrectly classified samples and class imbalance. Experimental outcomes on four target datasets compared to existing state-of-the-art models indicate the competitiveness of the proposed model's small sample HSIC performance and its suitability in time-constraint applications.</p>