S2-Transformer for Mask-Aware Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction

Snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) surges as a novel way of capturing hyperspectral images. It operates an optical encoder to compress the 3D data into a 2D measurement and adopts a software decoder for the signal reconstruction. Recently, a representative SCI set-up of coded aperture snapshot compressive imager (CASSI) with Transformer reconstruction backend remarks high-fidelity sensing performance. However, dominant spatial and spectral attention designs show limitations in hyperspectral modeling. The spatial attention values describe the inter-pixel correlation but overlook the across-spectra variation within each pixel. The spectral attention size is unscalable to the token spatial size and thus bottlenecks information allocation. Besides, CASSI entangles the spatial and spectral information into a 2D measurement, placing a barrier for information disentanglement and modeling. In addition, CASSI blocks the light with a physical binary mask, yielding the masked data loss. To tackle above challenges, we propose a spatial-spectral (S-2-) Transformer implemented by a paralleled attention design and a mask-aware learning strategy. First, we systematically explore pros and cons of different spatial (-spectral) attention designs, based on which we find performing both attentions in parallel well disentangles and models the blended information. Second, the masked pixels induce higher prediction difficulty and should be treated differently from unmasked ones. We adaptively prioritize the loss penalty attributing to the mask structure by referring to the mask-encoded prediction as an uncertainty estimator. We theoretically discuss the distinct convergence tendencies between masked/unmasked regions of the proposed learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that on average, the results of the proposed method are superior over the state-of-the-art methods. We empirically visualize and reason the behaviour of spatial and spectral attentions, and comprehensively examine the impact of the mask-aware learning, both of which advances the physics-driven deep network design for the reconstruction with CASSI.