Hierarchical Regression Network for Spectral Reconstruction from RGB Images
This work improves spectral reconstruction accuracy for applications like remote sensing or medical imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing neural network methods.
The authors tackled hyperspectral reconstruction from RGB images by proposing a Hierarchical Regression Network (HRNet) that addresses context information loss and encoder-decoder limitations, achieving first place in a real-world image track and third in a clean image track in the NTIRE 2020 Challenge.
Capturing visual image with a hyperspectral camera has been successfully applied to many areas due to its narrow-band imaging technology. Hyperspectral reconstruction from RGB images denotes a reverse process of hyperspectral imaging by discovering an inverse response function. Current works mainly map RGB images directly to corresponding spectrum but do not consider context information explicitly. Moreover, the use of encoder-decoder pair in current algorithms leads to loss of information. To address these problems, we propose a 4-level Hierarchical Regression Network (HRNet) with PixelShuffle layer as inter-level interaction. Furthermore, we adopt a residual dense block to remove artifacts of real world RGB images and a residual global block to build attention mechanism for enlarging perceptive field. We evaluate proposed HRNet with other architectures and techniques by participating in NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Spectral Reconstruction from RGB Images. The HRNet is the winning method of track 2 - real world images and ranks 3rd on track 1 - clean images. Please visit the project web page https://github.com/zhaoyuzhi/Hierarchical-Regression-Network-for-Spectral-Reconstruction-from-RGB-Images to try our codes and pre-trained models.