HyperVision: A Channel-Adaptive Ground-Based Hyperspectral Vision Pre-trained Backbone

While hyperspectral imaging provides rich spatial-spectral information across hundreds of narrow wavelength bands for precise material identification, ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbones remain absent, constrained by varying spectral configurations across sensors, limited annotations and heterogeneous labeling schemes, and the limited scale and scene diversity of existing datasets. To address these challenges and enable universal perception, we propose HyperVision, the first ground-based hyperspectral pre-trained backbone. First, to handle varying spectral configurations, HyperVision adopts a channel-adaptive dynamic embedding mechanism to map heterogeneous inputs into a unified token space. Second, we develop an unsupervised representation learning framework. Specifically, to address limited annotations and heterogeneous labeling schemes, a multi-source pseudo-labeling method is introduced to fuse spatial structures from SAM2 and fine-grained spectral material information from HyperFree. Furthermore, to enrich scene diversity and compensate for limited dataset scale, a cross-modal knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to transfer rich semantic representations from a pre-trained RGB vision model to our backbone. Pre-trained on a collection of 15k images from 26 diverse ground-based datasets, HyperVision demonstrates exceptional generalization. Requiring only efficient head-only adaptation without adjusting backbone parameters, it outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific methods across three downstream tasks under varying sensor configurations, yielding up to a 16.3% relative improvement in hyperspectral semantic segmentation AccM, a 2.1% relative gain in object tracking AUC, and a 35.5% reduction in salient object detection MAE. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lronkitty/HyperVision.