# Hybrid Spectral Denoising Transformer with Guided Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [Plug-and-Play ADMM for Image Restoration: Fixed Point Convergence and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01710/) (2016)
- [SpectralFormer: Rethinking Hyperspectral Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02988/) (2021)
- [Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00748/) (2023)
- [Mask-guided Spectral-wise Transformer for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07910/) (2021)
- [Rank Minimization for Snapshot Compressive Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07837/) (2018)
- [Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01576/) (2016)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Sparse Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04845/) (2022)
- [Hyperspectral Image Restoration via Total Variation Regularized Low-rank Tensor Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02477/) (2017)
- [Coded aperture compressive temporal imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.2575/) (2013)
- [Hyperspectral Image Denoising Employing a Spatial-Spectral Deep Residual Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00183/) (2018)
- [Learning Spatial-Spectral Prior for Super-Resolution of Hyperspectral Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08752/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [SSUMamba: Spatial-Spectral Selective State Space Model for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01726/) (2024)
- [PromptHSI: Universal Hyperspectral Image Restoration with Vision-Language Modulated Frequency Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15922/) (2024)
- [Real Noise Decoupling for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17196/) (2025)
- [MP-HSIR: A Multi-Prompt Framework for Universal Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09131/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Efficiency in Vision Transformer Networks: Design Techniques and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19882/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Separable Video Transformer for Snapshot Compressive Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11946/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Spatial-spectral Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08782/) (2024)
- [SHARE: A Fully Unsupervised Framework for Single Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13987/) (2026)
- [HSI-VAR: Rethinking Hyperspectral Restoration through Spatial-Spectral Visual Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00749/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Visible: Jointly Attending to Spectral and Spatial Dimensions with HSI-Diffusion for the FINCH Spacecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10724/) (2024)
- [Linear Attention Based Deep Nonlocal Means Filtering for Multiplicative Noise Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05087/) (2024)
- [Spectrum from Defocus: Fast Spectral Imaging with Chromatic Focal Stack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20184/) (2025)
- [Equal is Not Always Fair: A New Perspective on Hyperspectral Representation Non-Uniformity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11267/) (2025)
- [A TRPCA-Inspired Deep Unfolding Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Thresholded t-SVD and Top-K Sparse Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02364/) (2025)
- [AXS-Net: Interpretable Deep Unfolding for Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Spectral Basis Unmixing and Structured Noise Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08777/) (2026)
- [Super-Resolving Unseen Hyperspectral Sensors at Any Scale via Spatial Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a Hybrid Spectral Denoising Transformer (HSDT) for hyperspectral image denoising. Challenges in adapting transformer for HSI arise from the capabilities to tackle existing limitations of CNN-based methods in capturing the global and local spatial-spectral correlations while maintaining efficiency and flexibility. To address these issues, we introduce a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of both models with a Spatial-Spectral Separable Convolution (S3Conv), Guided Spectral Self-Attention (GSSA), and Self-Modulated Feed-Forward Network (SM-FFN). Our S3Conv works as a lightweight alternative to 3D convolution, which extracts more spatial-spectral correlated features while keeping the flexibility to tackle HSIs with an arbitrary number of bands. These features are then adaptively processed by GSSA which per-forms 3D self-attention across the spectral bands, guided by a set of learnable queries that encode the spectral signatures. This not only enriches our model with powerful capabilities for identifying global spectral correlations but also maintains linear complexity. Moreover, our SM-FFN proposes the self-modulation that intensifies the activations of more informative regions, which further strengthens the aggregated features. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets under both simulated and real-world noise, and it shows that our HSDT significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods while maintaining low computational overhead. Code is at https: //github.com/Zeqiang-Lai/HSDT.