Spectral Super-Resolution using Spatial-Spectral Residual Operator Networks

Spectral super-resolution of multispectral satellite images can enable high temporal- and spatial-resolution hyperspectral satellite imagery at a modest cost, significantly increasing the applicability of hyperspectral remote sensing. This task is inherently ill-posed, making it well-suited for deep learning-based methods. In this study, the spectral super-resolution task is framed as an operator learning problem, and SSRON is proposed as a Deep Operator Network that effectively learns function-to-function mappings from downsampled spectra to continuous spectra. The model is trained to super-resolve Sentinel-2A-like multispectral imagery to EMIT images. Compared to baseline models, SSRON achieves superior performance across all metrics. The model also demonstrates zero-shot spectral super-resolution capability by predicting bands unseen during training. Furthermore, its continuous-output formulation suggests the potential to estimate spectra at finer wavelength intervals than the native sensor. These results suggest the potential of SSRON and establishes operator learning as a promising direction for spectral super-resolution.