Hyperspectral image super-resolution based on attention ConvBiLSTM network

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution has become increasingly prevalent for its capability to integrate high-frequency spatial information from the paired high-resolution (HR) RGB reference (Ref-RGB) image. However, most of the existing methods either heavily rely on the accurate alignment between low-resolution (LR) HSIs and RGB images or can only deal with simulated unaligned RGB images generated by rigid geometric transformations, which weakens their effectiveness for real scenes. In this article, we explore the fusion-based HSI super-resolution with real Ref-RGB images that have both rigid and nonrigid misalignments. To properly address the limitations of existing methods for unaligned reference images, we propose an HSI fusion network (HSIFN) with heterogeneous feature extractions, multistage feature alignments, and attentive feature fusion. Specifically, our network first transforms the input HSI and RGB images into two sets of multiscale features with an HSI encoder and an RGB encoder, respectively. The features of Ref-RGB images are then processed by a multistage alignment module to explicitly align the features of Ref-RGB with the LR HSI. Finally, the aligned features of Ref-RGB are further adjusted by an adaptive attention module to focus more on discriminative regions before sending them to the fusion decoder to generate the reconstructed HR HSI. Additionally, we collect a real-world HSI fusion dataset, consisting of paired HSI and unaligned Ref-RGB, to support the evaluation of the proposed model for real scenes. Extensive experiments are conducted on both simulated and our real-world datasets, and it shows that our method obtains a clear improvement over existing single-image and fusion-based super-resolution methods on quantitative assessment as well as visual comparison. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://zeqiang-lai.github.io/HSI-RefSR/.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have very high spectral resolution, which can reflect the characteristics of different materials well. However, compared with RGB image or multispectral image (MSI), the spatial resolution of HSI is much lower, which limits its applications. Therefore, many super-resolution (SR) techniques have been proposed to reconstruct HSI with high spatial resolution image. To the best of our knowledge, there has not, to date, that been a study aimed at expatiating and summarizing the current research situation. Therefore, this is our motivation in this survey. In view of the promising development prospects in this field, this paper systematically reviews the existing SR methods of HSI. Specifically, two major categories are summarized, one is fusion-based methods, and the other is single HSI SR methods. At the end of the paper, several future development directions for HSI SR are given.

Super-resolution (SR) is significant for hyperspectral image (HSI) applications. In single-frame HSI SR, how to reconstruct detailed image structures in high resolution (HR) HSI is challenging since there is no auxiliary image (e.g., HR multispectral image) providing structural information. Wavelet could capture image structures in different orientations, and emphasis on predicting high-frequency wavelet sub-bands is helpful for recovering the detailed structures in HSI SR. In this study, we propose a multi-scale wavelet 3D convolutional neural network (MW-3D-CNN) for HSI SR, which predicts the wavelet coefficients of HR HSI rather than directly reconstructing the HR HSI. To exploit the correlation in the spectral and spatial domains, the MW-3D-CNN is built with 3D convolutional layers. An embedding subnet and a predicting subnet constitute the MW-3D-CNN, the embedding subnet extracts deep spatial-spectral features from the low resolution (LR) HSI and represents the LR HSI as a set of feature cubes. The feature cubes are then fed to the predicting subnet. There are multiple output branches in the predicting subnet, each of which corresponds to one wavelet sub-band and predicts the wavelet coefficients of HR HSI. The HR HSI can be obtained by applying inverse wavelet transform to the predicted wavelet coefficients. In the training stage, we propose to train the MW-3D-CNN with L1 norm loss, which is more suitable than the conventional L2 norm loss for penalizing the errors in different wavelet sub-bands. Experiments on both simulated and real spaceborne HSI demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with other state-of-the-art HSI SR methods.

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR) aims to recover high-resolution HSI (hr-HSI) from its two degraded modalities, that is, low-resolution HSI (lr-HSI) and high-resolution multispectral image (hr-MSI). The resulting HSI-SR image can be explained from two viewpoints, an inverse problem solution or a spatial–spectral information fusion product. Recent methods focusing on the former point are limited by demands of accurate degradation parameters and precise prior assumptions. On the contrary, the other research line avoids these drawbacks and offers a more flexible design. However, recent methods implicitly handle information fusion. The interaction between lr-HSI and hr-MSI only lies in the extracted feature domain, not directly on the data. Moreover, the proposed modules in recent methods promote information fusion from the perspective of deep learning and neglect the specialty of the HSI domain, leading to weak interpretability and poor reliability in practice. Considering the essence of the HSI-SR problem and the inherent property of HSIs, in this article, we propose a maximum mutual information (MMI) strategy. At first, we model the HSI-SR problem in a new variance inference (VI) architecture. This new VI model simulates the physical process of HSI pairs imaging and provides convenience for the MMI strategy. Then, we insert the MMI strategy in the VI model. The MMI strategy promotes information fusion with quantitative constraints on the information interaction between lr-HSI and hr-MSI. Finally, we implement the VI architecture with a neural network. Benefitting from the MMI strategy, a simple network structure can achieve efficient fusion performance, which indicates that MMI frees DL-based HSI-SR methods from the complicated structure design. The experimental results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method to state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability.

Hyperspectral images have high spectral resolution, but this is often at the expense of spatial resolution. Although deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) algorithms have shown comparative performance for spatial resolution enhancement, most of them cannot effectively extract features of different size objects because of single scale convolution. In deep architectures, low level features also tend to disappear during transmission. In this paper, an efficient network (MRBMFF) for enhancing the spatial resolution of hyperspectral image is proposed. Based on the multiscale residual block (MRB), features at different scales can be effectively extracted and fused. Meanwhile, the multilevel feature fusion (MFF) is introduced to concatenate the low and high level features. Effective SR images could be recovered after inputting their low-resolution counterparts to the proposed network. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves superior reconstruction performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Hyperspectral (HS) imaging systems are useful in a diverse range of applications that involve detection and classification tasks. However, the low spatial resolution of hyperspectral images may limit the performance of the involved tasks in such applications. In the last years, fusing the information of a HS image with high spatial resolution multispectral (MS) or panchromatic (PAN) images has been widely studied to enhance the spatial resolution. Image fusion has been formulated as an inverse problem whose solution is a HS image which assumed to be sparse in an analytic or learned dictionary. This work proposes a non-local centralized sparse representation model on a set of learned dictionaries in order to regularize the conventional fusion problem. The dictionaries are learned from the observed data taking advantage of the high spectral correlation within the HS image and the non-local self-similarity over the spatial domain of the MS image. Then, conditionally on these dictionaries, the fusion problem is solved by an alternating iterative numerical algorithm. Experimental results with real data show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under different quantitative assessments.

Hyperspectral (HS) remote sensing image with finer spectral information has great advantages in feature identification and classification. However, the spatial resolution of HS image is usually low due to practical limitations. In this paper, the low-spatial-resolution HS image is fused with the high-spatial-resolution multispectral (MS) image of the same observation scene to improve its spatial resolution. A novel spectral unmixing based HS and MS image fusion approach (VSC-CNMF) is proposed, in which CNMF with minimum endmember simplex volume and abundance sparsity constraints is employed for coupled unmixing of HS and MS images. Simulative experiments are employed for verification and comparison. The experimental results illustrate that the newly proposed VSC-CNMF based HS and MS fusion algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art unmixing based fusion approaches in cases with moderate number of endmembers.

The progress on Hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR) is still lagging behind the research of RGB image SR. HSIs usually have a high number of spectral bands, so accurately modeling spectral band interaction for HSI SR is hard. Also, training data for HSI SR is hard to obtain so the dataset is usually rather small. In this work, we propose a new test-time training method to tackle this problem. Specifically, a novel self-training framework is developed, where more accurate pseudo-labels and more accurate LR-HR relationships are generated so that the model can be further trained with them to improve performance. In order to better support our test-time training method, we also propose a new network architecture to learn HSI SR without modeling spectral band interaction and propose a new data augmentation method Spectral Mixup to increase the diversity of the training data at test time. We also collect a new HSI dataset with a diverse set of images of interesting objects ranging from food to vegetation, to materials, and to general scenes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method can improve the performance of pre-trained models significantly after test-time training and outperform competing methods significantly for HSI SR.

Limited by the existing imagery sensors, hyperspectral images are characterized by high spectral resolution but low spatial resolution. The super-resolution (SR) technique aiming at enhancing the spatial resolution of the input image is a hot topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present a hyperspectral image (HSI) SR method based on a deep information distillation network (IDN) and an intra-fusion operation. Specifically, bands are firstly selected by a certain distance and super-resolved by an IDN. The IDN employs distillation blocks to gradually extract abundant and efficient features for reconstructing the selected bands. Second, the unselected bands are obtained via spectral correlation, yielding a coarse high-resolution (HR) HSI. Finally, the spectral-interpolated coarse HR HSI is intra-fused with the input HSI to achieve a finer HR HSI, making further use of the spatial-spectral information these unselected bands convey. Different from most existing fusion-based HSI SR methods, the proposed intra-fusion operation does not require any auxiliary co-registered image as the input, which makes this method more practical. Moreover, contrary to most single-based HSI SR methods whose performance decreases significantly as the image quality gets worse, the proposal deeply utilizes the spatial-spectral information and the mapping knowledge provided by the IDN, which achieves more robust performance. Experimental data and comparative analysis have demonstrated the effectiveness of this method.

Hyperspectral images (HSI) contain rich spectral information and are highly valuable in applications such as remote sensing monitoring and target identification. However, due to limitations in imaging technology and cost constraints, existing HSI generally suffer from low spatial resolution. Recently, several hyperspectral vision foundation models have been proposed, employing large-scale network architectures and newly constructed large-scale datasets, achieving remarkable performance in HSI super resolution (SR) and other hyperspectral vision tasks. However, as these general-purpose foundation models are designed to accommodate diverse vision tasks, their architectures exhibit inherent limitations when applied specifically to SR as a low-level vision task. To address this architectural limitation, we propose HyperAdapter, an enhanced network based on HyperSIGMA that employs task-specific architectural optimization to fully exploit the performance potential of foundation models for SR tasks. Specifically, we introduce a spatial-spectral prior module to improve the model’s ability to capture local spatial context and spectral correlations in HSI, along with an adapter module to effectively integrate and refine the spatial and spectral features of the base model, ensuring better adaptation to the HSI SR task. Experiments on three public HSI SR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves reconstruction performance, validating its superiority and practical utility.

Hyperspectral images with hundreds of spectral bands have been proven to yield high performance in material classification. However, despite intensive advancement in hardware, the spatial resolution is still somewhat low, as compared to that of color and multispectral (MS) imagers. In this paper, we aim at presenting some ideas that may further enhance the performance of some remote sensing applications such as border monitoring and Mars exploration using hyperspectral images. One popular approach to enhancing the spatial resolution of hyperspectral images is pansharpening. We present a brief review of recent image resolution enhancement algorithms, including single super-resolution and multi-image fusion algorithms, for hyperspectral images. Advantages and limitations of the enhancement algorithms are highlighted. Some limitations in the pansharpening process include the availability of high resolution (HR) panchromatic (pan) and/or MS images, the registration of images from multiple sources, the availability of point spread function (PSF), and reliable and consistent image quality assessment. We suggest some proactive ideas to alleviate the above issues in practice. In the event where hyperspectral images are not available, we suggest the use of band synthesis techniques to generate HR hyperspectral images from low resolution (LR) MS images. Several recent interesting applications in border monitoring and Mars exploration using hyperspectral images are presented. Finally, some future directions in this research area are highlighted.

Hyperspectral images (HSI) have high-dimensional and complex spectral characteristics, with dozens or even hundreds of bands covering the same area of pixels. The rich information of the ground objects makes hyperspectral images widely used in satellite remote sensing. Due to the limitations of remote sensing satellite sensors, hyperspectral images suffer from insufficient spatial resolution. Therefore, utilizing software algorithms to improve the spatial resolution of hyperspectral images has become an urgent problem that needs to be solved. The spatial information and spectral information of hyperspectral images are strongly correlated. If only the spatial resolution is improved, it often damages the spectral information. Inspired by the high correlation between spectral information in adjacent spectral bands of hyperspectral images, a hybrid convolution and spectral symmetry preservation network has been proposed for hyperspectral super-resolution reconstruction. This includes a model to integrate information from neighboring spectral bands to supplement target band feature information. The proposed model introduces flexible spatial-spectral symmetric 3D convolution in the network structure to extract low-resolution and neighboring band features. At the same time, a combination of deformable convolution and attention mechanisms is used to extract information from low-resolution bands. Finally, multiple bands are fused in the reconstruction module, and the high-resolution hyperspectral image containing global information is obtained by Fourier transform upsampling. Experiments were conducted on the indoor hyperspectral image dataset CAVE, the airborne hyperspectral dataset Pavia Center, and Chikusei. In the X2 super-resolution task, the PSNR values achieved on the CAVE, Pavia Center, and Chikusei datasets were 46.335, 36.321, and 46.310, respectively. In the X4 super-resolution task, the PSNR values achieved on the CAVE, Pavia Center, and Chikusei datasets were 41.218, 30.377, and 38.365, respectively. The results show that our method outperforms many advanced algorithms in objective indicators such as PSNR and SSIM while maintaining the spectral characteristics of hyperspectral images.

Super-resolution image reconstruction has been utilized to overcome the problem of spatial resolution limitation in hyperspectral (HS) imaging. To improve the spatial resolution of HS image, this paper proposes an HS-multispectral (MS) fusion method, which exploits spatial and spectral correlations and proper regularization. High spatial correlation between MS image and the desired high-resolution HS image is conserved via an over-completed dictionary, and the spectral degradation between them projected onto the space of sparsity is applied as the spectral constraint. The high spectral correlation between high-spatial- and low-spatial-resolution HS image is preserved through linear spectral unmixing. The idea of an interactive feedback proposed in our previous work is also used when dealing with spatial reconstruction and unmixing. Low-rank property is introduced in this paper to regularize the sparse coefficients of the HS patch matrix, which is utilized as the spatial constraint. Experiments on both simulated and real data sets demonstrate that the proposed fusion algorithm achieves lower spectral distortions and the super-resolution results are superior to those of other state-of-the-art methods.

The production of a high spatial resolution (HR) hyperspectral image (HSI) through the fusion of a low spatial resolution (LR) HSI with an HR multispectral image (MSI) has underpinned much of the recent progress in HSI super-resolution. The premise of these signs of progress is that both the degeneration from the HR HSI to LR HSI in the spatial domain and the degeneration from the HR HSI to HR MSI in the spectral domain are assumed to be known in advance. However, such a premise is difficult to achieve in practice. To address this problem, we propose to incorporate degeneration estimation into HSI super-resolution and present an unsupervised deep framework for "blind" HSIs super-resolution where the degenerations in both domains are unknown. In this framework, we model the latent HR HSI and the unknown degenerations with deep network structures to regularize them instead of using handcrafted (or shallow) priors. Specifically, we generate the latent HR HSI with an image-specific generator network and structure the degenerations in spatial and spectral domains through a convolution layer and a fully connected layer, respectively. By doing this, the proposed framework can be formulated as an end-to-end deep network learning problem, which is purely supervised by those two input images (i.e., LR HSI and HR MSI) and can be effectively solved by the backpropagation algorithm. Experiments on both natural scene and remote sensing HSI data sets show the superior performance of the proposed method in coping with unknown degeneration either in the spatial domain, spectral domain, or even both of them.

The hyperspectral image (HSI) distinguishes itself in material identification through its exceptional spectral resolution. However, its spatial resolution is constrained by hardware limitations, prompting the evolution of HSI super-resolution (SR) techniques. Single HSI SR endeavors to reconstruct high-spatial-resolution HSI from low-spatial-resolution inputs, and recent progress in deep learning-based algorithms has significantly advanced the quality of reconstructed images. However, convolutional methods struggle to extract comprehensive spatial and spectral features. Transformer-based models have yet to harness long-range dependencies across both dimensions fully, thus inadequately integrating spatial and spectral data. To solve the above problem, in this paper, we propose a new HSI SR method, SSAformer, which merges the strengths of CNNs and Transformers. It introduces specially designed attention mechanisms for HSI, including spatial and spectral attention modules, and overcomes the previous challenges in extracting and amalgamating spatial and spectral information. Evaluations on benchmark datasets show that SSAformer surpasses contemporary methods in enhancing spatial details and preserving spectral accuracy, underscoring its potential to expand HSI’s utility in various domains, such as environmental monitoring and remote sensing.