Fengchao Xiong

Guanyiman Fu, Jingtao Li, Zihang Cheng et al.

While hyperspectral imaging provides rich spatial-spectral information across hundreds of narrow wavelength bands for precise material identification, ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbones remain absent, constrained by varying spectral configurations across sensors, the scarcity and inconsistency of labels, and the limited scale and scene diversity of existing datasets. To address these challenges and enable universal perception, we propose HyperVision, the first ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbone. First, to handle varying spectral configurations, HyperVision adopts a channel-adaptive dynamic embedding mechanism to map heterogeneous inputs into a unified token space. Second, to address the scarcity and inconsistency of labels, we introduce a multi-source pseudo-labeling method that fuses semantic representations from both spatial structures generated by SAM2 and fine-grained spectral material information extracted by HyperFree. Third, to compensate for limited dataset scale and enrich scene diversity, a cross-modal knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to transfer rich semantic representations from a pre-trained RGB vision model to our hyperspectral backbone. Pre-trained on a collection of 15k images from 26 diverse ground-based datasets, HyperVision demonstrates exceptional generalization. Requiring only efficient head-only adaptation without adjusting backbone parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to task-specific methods across three downstream tasks under varying sensor configurations, yielding up to a 16.3% relative improvement in hyperspectral semantic segmentation $\mathrm{Acc}_{\mathrm{M}}$, a 2.1% relative gain in object tracking AUC, and a 35.5% reduction in salient object detection MAE. The source code and pre-trained model will be publicly available at https://github.com/lronkitty/HyperVision .

Guanyiman Fu, Fengchao Xiong, Jianfeng Lu et al.

Denoising is a crucial preprocessing step for hyperspectral images (HSIs) due to noise arising from intra-imaging mechanisms and environmental factors. Long-range spatial-spectral correlation modeling is beneficial for HSI denoising but often comes with high computational complexity. Based on the state space model (SSM), Mamba is known for its remarkable long-range dependency modeling capabilities and computational efficiency. Building on this, we introduce a memory-efficient spatial-spectral UMamba (SSUMamba) for HSI denoising, with the spatial-spectral continuous scan (SSCS) Mamba being the core component. SSCS Mamba alternates the row, column, and band in six different orders to generate the sequence and uses the bidirectional SSM to exploit long-range spatial-spectral dependencies. In each order, the images are rearranged between adjacent scans to ensure spatial-spectral continuity. Additionally, 3D convolutions are embedded into the SSCS Mamba to enhance local spatial-spectral modeling. Experiments demonstrate that SSUMamba achieves superior denoising results with lower memory consumption per batch compared to transformer-based methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/lronkitty/SSUMamba.

Jingzhou Chen, Dexin Chen, Fengchao Xiong et al.

Fine-grained remote sensing datasets often use hierarchical label structures to differentiate objects in a coarse-to-fine manner, with each object annotated across multiple levels. However, embedding this semantic hierarchy into the representation learning space to improve fine-grained detection performance remains challenging. Previous studies have applied supervised contrastive learning at different hierarchical levels to group objects under the same parent class while distinguishing sibling subcategories. Nevertheless, they overlook two critical issues: (1) imbalanced data distribution across the label hierarchy causes high-frequency classes to dominate the learning process, and (2) learning semantic relationships among categories interferes with class-agnostic localization. To address these issues, we propose a balanced hierarchical contrastive loss combined with a decoupled learning strategy within the detection transformer (DETR) framework. The proposed loss introduces learnable class prototypes and equilibrates gradients contributed by different classes at each hierarchical level, ensuring that each hierarchical class contributes equally to the loss computation in every mini-batch. The decoupled strategy separates DETR's object queries into classification and localization sets, enabling task-specific feature extraction and optimization. Experiments on three fine-grained datasets with hierarchical annotations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Guanyiman Fu, Fengchao Xiong, Jianfeng Lu et al.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from noise arising from both intra-imaging mechanisms and environmental factors. Leveraging domain knowledge specific to HSIs, such as global spectral correlation (GSC) and non-local spatial self-similarity (NSS), is crucial for effective denoising. Existing methods tend to independently utilize each of these knowledge components with multiple blocks, overlooking the inherent 3D nature of HSIs where domain knowledge is strongly interlinked, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a spatial-spectral recurrent transformer U-Net (SSRT-UNet) for HSI denoising. The proposed SSRT-UNet integrates NSS and GSC properties within a single SSRT block. This block consists of a spatial branch and a spectral branch. The spectral branch employs a combination of transformer and recurrent neural network to perform recurrent computations across bands, allowing for GSC exploitation beyond a fixed number of bands. Concurrently, the spatial branch encodes NSS for each band by sharing keys and values with the spectral branch under the guidance of GSC. This interaction between the two branches enables the joint utilization of NSS and GSC, avoiding their independent treatment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms several alternative approaches. The source code will be available at https://github.com/lronkitty/SSRT.

Fengchao Xiong, Zhenxing Wu, Sen Jia et al.

Hyperspectral videos (HSVs), with their inherent spatial-spectral-temporal structure, offer distinct advantages in challenging tracking scenarios such as cluttered backgrounds and small objects. However, existing methods primarily focus on spatial interactions between the template and search regions, often overlooking spectral interactions, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, this paper investigates spectral interactions from both the architectural and training perspectives. At the architectural level, we first establish band-wise long-range spatial relationships between the template and search regions using Transformers. We then model spectral interactions using the inclusion-exclusion principle from set theory, treating them as the union of spatial interactions across all bands. This enables the effective integration of both shared and band-specific spatial cues. At the training level, we introduce a spectral loss to enforce material distribution alignment between the template and predicted regions, enhancing robustness to shape deformation and appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our tracker achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance. The source code, trained models and results will be publicly available via https://github.com/bearshng/suit to support reproducibility.

Jin Ye, Fengchao Xiong, Jun Zhou et al.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial preprocessing step for subsequent tasks. The clean HSI usually reside in a low-dimensional subspace, which can be captured by low-rank and sparse representation, known as the physical prior of HSI. It is generally challenging to adequately use such physical properties for effective denoising while preserving image details. This paper introduces a novel iterative low-rank network (ILRNet) to address these challenges. ILRNet integrates the strengths of model-driven and data-driven approaches by embedding a rank minimization module (RMM) within a U-Net architecture. This module transforms feature maps into the wavelet domain and applies singular value thresholding (SVT) to the low-frequency components during the forward pass, leveraging the spectral low-rankness of HSIs in the feature domain. The parameter, closely related to the hyperparameter of the singular vector thresholding algorithm, is adaptively learned from the data, allowing for flexible and effective capture of low-rankness across different scenarios. Additionally, ILRNet features an iterative refinement process that adaptively combines intermediate denoised HSIs with noisy inputs. This manner ensures progressive enhancement and superior preservation of image details. Experimental results demonstrate that ILRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in both synthetic and real-world noise removal tasks.

Jin Ye, Jingran Wang, Fengchao Xiong et al.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) play a crucial role in remote sensing but are often degraded by complex noise patterns. Ensuring the physical property of the denoised HSIs is vital for robust HSI denoising, giving the rise of deep unfolding-based methods. However, these methods map the optimization of a physical model to a learnable network with a predefined depth, which lacks convergence guarantees. In contrast, Deep Equilibrium (DEQ) models treat the hidden layers of deep networks as the solution to a fixed-point problem and models them as infinite-depth networks, naturally consistent with the optimization. Under the framework of DEQ, we propose a Deep Equilibrium Convolutional Sparse Coding (DECSC) framework that unifies local spatial-spectral correlations, nonlocal spatial self-similarities, and global spatial consistency for robust HSI denoising. Within the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) framework, we enforce shared 2D convolutional sparse representation to ensure global spatial consistency across bands, while unshared 3D convolutional sparse representation captures local spatial-spectral details. To further exploit nonlocal self-similarities, a transformer block is embedded after the 2D CSC. Additionally, a detail enhancement module is integrated with the 3D CSC to promote image detail preservation. We formulate the proximal gradient descent of the CSC model as a fixed-point problem and transform the iterative updates into a learnable network architecture within the framework of DEQ. Experimental results demonstrate that our DECSC method achieves superior denoising performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Fengchao Xiong, Shuyin Tao, Jun Zhou et al.

Deep learning (DL) based hyperspectral images (HSIs) denoising approaches directly learn the nonlinear mapping between observed noisy images and underlying clean images. They normally do not consider the physical characteristics of HSIs, therefore making them lack of interpretability that is key to understand their denoising mechanism.. In order to tackle this problem, we introduce a novel model guided interpretable network for HSI denoising. Specifically, fully considering the spatial redundancy, spectral low-rankness and spectral-spatial properties of HSIs, we first establish a subspace based multi-dimensional sparse model. This model first projects the observed HSIs into a low-dimensional orthogonal subspace, and then represents the projected image with a multidimensional dictionary. After that, the model is unfolded into an end-to-end network named SMDS-Net whose fundamental modules are seamlessly connected with the denoising procedure and optimization of the model. This makes SMDS-Net convey clear physical meanings, i.e., learning the low-rankness and sparsity of HSIs. Finally, all key variables including dictionaries and thresholding parameters are obtained by the end-to-end training. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis confirm the denoising ability and interpretability of our method against the state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods.

Fengchao Xiong, Jun Zhou, Yuntao Qian

Traditional color images only depict color intensities in red, green and blue channels, often making object trackers fail in challenging scenarios, e.g., background clutter and rapid changes of target appearance. Alternatively, material information of targets contained in a large amount of bands of hyperspectral images (HSI) is more robust to these difficult conditions. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on how material information can be utilized to boost object tracking from three aspects: benchmark dataset, material feature representation and material based tracking. In terms of benchmark, we construct a dataset of fully-annotated videos, which contain both hyperspectral and color sequences of the same scene. Material information is represented by spectral-spatial histogram of multidimensional gradient, which describes the 3D local spectral-spatial structure in an HSI, and fractional abundances of constituted material components which encode the underlying material distribution. These two types of features are embedded into correlation filters, yielding material based tracking. Experimental results on the collected benchmark dataset show the potentials and advantages of material based object tracking.

Kun Qian, Jun Zhou, Fengchao Xiong et al.

Target tracking in hyperspectral videos is a new research topic. In this paper, a novel method based on convolutional network and Kernelized Correlation Filter (KCF) framework is presented for tracking objects of interest in hyperspectral videos. We extract a set of normalized three-dimensional cubes from the target region as fixed convolution filters which contain spectral information surrounding a target. The feature maps generated by convolutional operations are combined to form a three-dimensional representation of an object, thereby providing effective encoding of local spectral-spatial information. We show that a simple two-layer convolutional networks is sufficient to learn robust representations without the need of offline training with a large dataset. In the tracking step, KCF is adopted to distinguish targets from neighboring environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well on sample hyperspectral videos, and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods tested on grayscale and color videos in the same scene.