ESSTformer: A CNN-Transformer Hybrid with Decoupled Spatial Spectral Transformers for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are crucial for ground object classification, target detection, and related applications due to their rich spatial spectral information. However, hardware limitations in imaging systems make it challenging to directly acquire HSIs with a high spatial resolution. While deep learning-based single hyperspectral image super-resolution (SHSR) methods have made significant progress, existing approaches primarily rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with fixed geometric kernels, which struggle to model global spatial spectral dependencies effectively. To address this, we propose ESSTformer, a novel SHSR framework that synergistically integrates CNNs’ local feature extraction and Transformers’ global modeling capabilities. Specifically, we design a multi-scale spectral attention module (MSAM) based on dilated convolutions to capture local multi-scale spatial spectral features. Considering the inherent differences between spatial and spectral information, we adopt a decoupled processing strategy by constructing separate spatial and Spectral Transformers. The Spatial Transformer employs window attention mechanisms and an improved convolutional multi-layer perceptron (CMLP) to model long-range spatial dependencies, while the Spectral Transformer utilizes self-attention mechanisms combined with a spectral enhancement module to focus on discriminative spectral features. Extensive experiments on three hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed ESSTformer achieves a superior performance in super-resolution reconstruction compared to state-of-the-art methods.