A CNN-Transformer Embedded Unfolding Network for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) with rich spectral information have been widely used in surface classification, object detection, and other real application problems. However, due to the hardware limitations, the low spatial resolution HSIs hinder the exploration of their application potential. Deep learning-based methods are currently the most common solutions for single HSI super-resolution (HSI SR) tasks. However, such methods often overlook the degradation principle from high-resolution HSI to low-resolution HSI. In this article, we propose a CNN-transformer embedded unfolding network (CTUNet), in which an unfolding framework with an effective spatial-spectral prior network is designed for HSI SR by incorporating the degradation principle of HSIs. Specifically, a maximum posterior-based energy model is employed, enabling alternate optimization to seek the optimal solution in an iterative mechanism. To effectively utilize the structure prior of HSI, multiscale self-calibrated convolution (MSSC) and edge-guided transformer module are combined to learn latent spatial-spectral priors. Additionally, hidden feature connections between adjacent iterations enhance the representation of the image features. Extensive experiments conducted on three available HSI datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art HSI SR methods. The code will be available at
https://github.com/YoeTon/CTUNet
.