  Deep-learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration methods have gained
great popularity for their remarkable performance but often demand expensive
network retraining whenever the specifics of task changes. In this paper, we
propose to restore HSIs in a unified approach with an effective plug-and-play
method, which can jointly retain the flexibility of optimization-based methods
and utilize the powerful representation capability of deep neural networks.
Specifically, we first develop a new deep HSI denoiser leveraging gated
recurrent convolution units, short- and long-term skip connections, and an
augmented noise level map to better exploit the abundant spatio-spectral
information within HSIs. It, therefore, leads to the state-of-the-art
performance on HSI denoising under both Gaussian and complex noise settings.
Then, the proposed denoiser is inserted into the plug-and-play framework as a
powerful implicit HSI prior to tackle various HSI restoration tasks. Through
extensive experiments on HSI super-resolution, compressed sensing, and
inpainting, we demonstrate that our approach often achieves superior
performance, which is competitive with or even better than the state-of-the-art
on each task, via a single model without any task-specific training.
