Abstract. Obtaining ground truth for hyperspectral data is an expensive task. In addition, a number of factors cause the spectral signatures of the same class to vary with location and/or time. Therefore, adapting a classifier designed from available labeled data to classify new hyperspectral images is difficult, but invaluable to the remote sensing community. In this paper, we use the Binary Hierarchical Classifier to propose a knowledge transfer framework that leverages the information gathered from existing labeled data to classify the data obtained from a spatially separate test area. Experimental results show that in the absence of any labeled data in the new area, our approach is better than a direct application of the old classifier on the new data. Moreover, when small amounts of labeled data are available from the new area, our framework offers further improvements through semi-supervised learning mechanisms.