I work mostly with RGB/Thermal, if that counts. My PhD was in stereo/lidar fusion, so I've always been into mixing sensors :)

I've also done some work on satellite imaging which is 13-band (Sentinel 2). Lots of people in ecology use the Parrot Sequoia which is four-band multispectral. There really isn't much published work in ML beyond RGB, which I find interesting - yes there's RGB-D and LIDAR but it's mostly for driving applications. Part of the reason I'm so familiar with the yolo codebases is that I've had to modify them a lot to work with non-standard data. There's nothing that stops you from using n-channel images, but you will almost certainly have to hack every off the shelf solution to make it work. RGB and 8-bit is almost always hard coded, augmentation also often fails with non RGB data (albumentations is good though). A bigger issue is there's a massive lack of good labelled datasets for non rgb imagery.

On the plus side, in a landscape where everyone is fighting over COCO, there is still a lot of low hanging fruit to pick I think.

I've not done any hyperspectral, very hard to (a) get labelled data (there's AVIRIS and EO-1/Hyperion maybe) (b) it's very hard to label, the images are enormous and (c) the cameras are stupid expensive.

By the way, even satellite imaging ML applications tend to overwhelmingly use just the RGB channels and not the full extent of the data.

Whoa that's awesome! Love hearing contemporary technology used to detect/diagnose/monitor the environment and our ecological impact. Boots on ground will always be important but the horizontal scaling you can get out of imaging I would imagine really helps prioritize where you turn your attention. Thanks for the info and best of luck!