Degradation Alchemy: Self-Supervised Unknown-to-Known Transformation for Blind Hyperspectral Image Fusion
This addresses a domain-specific challenge in remote sensing by improving generalization for blind hyperspectral image fusion, though it is incremental as it builds on existing supervised learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of hyperspectral image fusion generalizing poorly to unknown degradations by proposing a self-supervised framework that transforms unknown degradations into known ones, enabling pre-trained models to handle them effectively, with experiments showing it boosts adaptability and surpasses state-of-the-art blind methods.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) fusion is an efficient technique that combines low-resolution HSI (LR-HSI) and high-resolution multispectral images (HR-MSI) to generate high-resolution HSI (HR-HSI). Existing supervised learning methods (SLMs) can yield promising results when test data degradation matches the training ones, but they face challenges in generalizing to unknown degradations. To unleash the potential and generalization ability of SLMs, we propose a novel self-supervised unknown-to-known degradation transformation framework (U2K) for blind HSI fusion, which adaptively transforms unknown degradation into the same type of degradation as those handled by pre-trained SLMs. Specifically, the proposed U2K framework consists of: (1) spatial and spectral Degradation Wrapping (DW) modules that map HR-HSI to unknown degraded HR-MSI and LR-HSI, and (2) Degradation Transformation (DT) modules that convert these wrapped data into predefined degradation patterns. The transformed HR-MSI and LR-HSI pairs are then processed by a pre-trained network to reconstruct the target HR-HSI. We train the U2K framework in a self-supervised manner using consistency loss and greedy alternating optimization, significantly improving the flexibility of blind HSI fusion. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed U2K framework in boosting the adaptability of five existing SLMs under various degradation settings and surpassing state-of-the-art blind methods.