Generative Artificial Intelligence for Hyperspectral Sensor Data: A Review

Airborne platforms and satellites provide rich sensor data in the form of hyperspectral images (HSI), which are crucial for numerous vision-related tasks, such as feature extraction, image enhancement, and data synthesis. This article reviews the contextual importance and applications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in the advancement of HSI processing. GAI methods address the inherent challenges of HSI data, such as high dimensionality, noise, and the need to preserve spectral-spatial correlations, rendering them indispensable for modern HSI analysis. Generative neural networks, including generative adversarial networks and denoising diffusion probabilistic models, are highlighted for their superior performance in classification, segmentation, and object identification tasks, often surpassing traditional approaches, such as U-Nets, autoencoders, and deep convolutional neural networks. Diffusion models showed competitive performance in tasks, such as feature extraction and image resolution enhancement, particularly in terms of inference time and computational cost. Transformer architectures combined with attention mechanisms further improved the accuracy of generative methods, particularly for preserving spectral and spatial information in tasks, such as image translation, data augmentation, and data synthesis. Despite these advancements, challenges remain, particularly in developing computationally efficient models for super-resolution and data synthesis. In addition, novel evaluation metrics tailored to the complex nature of HSI data are needed. This review underscores the potential of GAI in addressing these challenges while presenting its current strengths, limitations, and future research directions.