  In many computer vision applications, obtaining images of high resolution in
both the spatial and spectral domains are equally important. However, due to
hardware limitations, one can only expect to acquire images of high resolution
in either the spatial or spectral domains. This paper focuses on hyperspectral
image super-resolution (HSI-SR), where a hyperspectral image (HSI) with low
spatial resolution (LR) but high spectral resolution is fused with a
multispectral image (MSI) with high spatial resolution (HR) but low spectral
resolution to obtain HR HSI. Existing deep learning-based solutions are all
supervised that would need a large training set and the availability of HR HSI,
which is unrealistic. Here, we make the first attempt to solving the HSI-SR
problem using an unsupervised encoder-decoder architecture that carries the
following uniquenesses. First, it is composed of two encoder-decoder networks,
coupled through a shared decoder, in order to preserve the rich spectral
information from the HSI network. Second, the network encourages the
representations from both modalities to follow a sparse Dirichlet distribution
which naturally incorporates the two physical constraints of HSI and MSI.
Third, the angular difference between representations are minimized in order to
reduce the spectral distortion. We refer to the proposed architecture as
unsupervised Sparse Dirichlet-Net, or uSDN. Extensive experimental results
demonstrate the superior performance of uSDN as compared to the
state-of-the-art.
