In this paper, spectral–spatial preprocessing using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) multilevel decomposition and spatial filtering is proposed for improving the accuracy of hyperspectral imagery classification. Specifically, spectral DWT multilevel decomposition (SDWT) is performed on the hyperspectral image to separate the approximation coefficients from the detail coefficients. For each level of decomposition, only the detail coefficients are spatially filtered instead of being discarded, as is often adopted by the wavelet-based approaches. Thus, three different spatial filters are explored, including two-dimensional DWT (2D-DWT), adaptive Wiener filter (AWF), and two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT). After the enhancement of the spectral information by performing the spatial filter on the detail coefficients, DWT reconstruction is carried out on both the approximation and the filtered detail coefficients. The final preprocessed image is fed into a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Evaluation results on three widely used real hyperspectral datasets show that the proposed framework using spectral DWT multilevel decomposition with 2D-DCT filter (SDWT-2DCT_SVM) exhibits a significant performance and outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy, even under the constraint of small training sample size, and execution time.