HyperTransformer: A Textural and Spectral Feature Fusion Transformer for Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to fuse a registered high-resolution panchromatic image (PAN) with a low-resolution hyper-spectral image (LR-HSI) to generate an enhanced HSI with high spectral and spatial resolution. Existing pansharpening approaches neglect using an attention mechanism to transfer HR texture features from PAN to LR-HSI features, resulting in spatial and spectral distortions. In this paper, we present a novel attention mechanism for pansharpening called HyperTransformer, in which features of LR-HSI and PAN are formulated as queries and keys in a transformer, respectively. HyperTransformer consists of three main modules, namely two separate feature extractors for PAN and HSI, a multi-head feature soft-attention module, and a spatial-spectral feature fusion module. Such a network improves both spatial and spectral quality measures of the pansharpened HSI by learning cross-feature space dependencies and long-range details of PAN and LR-HSI. Furthermore, HyperTransformer can be utilized across multiple spatial scales at the backbone for obtaining improved performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used datasets demonstrate that HyperTransformer achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on both spatial and spectral quality measures. Implementation code and pretrained weights can be accessed at https://github.com/wgcban/HyperTransformer.