UnmixingSR: Material-aware Network with Unsupervised Unmixing as Auxiliary Task for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Deep learning-based (DL-based) hyperspectral image (HIS) super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved remarkable performance and attracted attention in industry and academia. Nonetheless, most current methods explored and learned the mapping relationship between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) HSIs, leading to the side effect of increasing unreliability and irrationality in solving the ill-posed SR problem. We find, quite interestingly, LR imaging is similar to the mixed pixel phenomenon. A single photodetector in sensor arrays receives the reflectance signals reflected by a number of classes, resulting in low spatial resolution and mixed pixel problems. Inspired by this observation, this paper proposes a component-aware HSI SR network called UnmixingSR, in which the unsupervised HU as an auxiliary task is used to perceive the material components of HSIs. We regard HU as an auxiliary task and incorporate it into the HSI SR process by exploring the constraints between LR and HR abundances. Instead of only learning the mapping relationship between LR and HR HSIs, we leverage the bond between LR abundances and HR abundances to boost the stability of our method in solving SR problems. Moreover, the proposed unmixing process can be embedded into existing deep SR models as a plug-in-play auxiliary task. Experimental results on hyperspectral experiments show that unmixing process as an auxiliary task incorporated into the SR problem is feasible and rational, achieving outstanding performance. The code is available at