# Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Spatial-Spectral Recurrent Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [LSTM: A Search Space Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.04069/) (2015)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [SpectralFormer: Rethinking Hyperspectral Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02988/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Temporal Action Detection with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10271/) (2021)
- [Mask-guided Spectral-wise Transformer for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07910/) (2021)
- [Block-Recurrent Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07852/) (2022)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Sparse Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04845/) (2022)
- [Simple Recurrent Units for Highly Parallelizable Recurrence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02755/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Contextual CNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03519/) (2016)
- [Hyperspectral Image Denoising Employing a Spatial-Spectral Deep Residual Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00183/) (2018)
- [3D Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04547/) (2020)
- [Non-local Meets Global: An Iterative Paradigm for Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12921/) (2020)
- [Fast Hyperspectral Image Denoising and Inpainting Based on Low-Rank and Sparse Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06842/) (2021)
- [Material Based Object Tracking in Hyperspectral Videos: Benchmark and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04179/) (2018)
- [Spectral Enhanced Rectangle Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00844/) (2023)
- [A Trainable Spectral-Spatial Sparse Coding Model for Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09708/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Spectral Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14090/) (2022)
- [DDS2M: Self-Supervised Denoising Diffusion Spatio-Spectral Model for Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06682/) (2023)
- [Denoising Hyperspectral Image with Non-i.i.d. Noise Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00098/) (2017)
- [SMDS-Net: Model Guided Spectral-Spatial Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01829/) (2020)
- [EleAtt-RNN: Adding Attentiveness to Neurons in Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01939/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Hyperspectral Image Restoration: From the View of Low-Rank Tensor Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08839/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SSUMamba: Spatial-Spectral Selective State Space Model for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01726/) (2024)
- [HADAR-Based Thermal Infrared Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13664/) (2026)
- [AI-Driven HSI: Multimodality, Fusion, Challenges, and the Deep Learning Revolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06894/) (2025)
- [Scalable neural pushbroom architectures for real-time denoising of hyperspectral images onboard satellites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05020/) (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)
- [Hybrid-Domain Synergistic Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20099/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.