Cascaded Multi-Attention Feature Recurrent Enhancement Network for Spectral Super-Resolution Reconstruction

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) captures the same scene across multiple spectral bands, providing richer spectral characteristics of materials than conventional RGB images. The spectral reconstruction task seeks to map RGB images into hyperspectral images, enabling high-quality HSI data acquisition without additional hardware investment. Traditional methods based on linear models or sparse representations struggle to effectively model the nonlinear characteristics of hyperspectral data. Although deep learning approaches have made significant progress, issues such as detail loss and insufficient modeling of spatial–spectral relationships persist. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Cascaded Multi-Attention Feature Recurrent Enhancement Network (CMFREN). This method achieves targeted breakthroughs over existing approaches through a cascaded architecture of feature purification, spectral balancing and progressive enhancement. This network comprises two core modules: (1) the Hierarchical Residual Attention (HRA) module, which suppresses artifacts in illumination transition regions through residual connections and multi-scale contextual feature fusion, and (2) the Cascaded Multi-Attention (CMA) module, which incorporates a Spatial–Spectral Balanced Feature Extraction (SSBFE) module and a Spectral Enhancement Module (SEM). The SSBFE combines Multi-Scale Residual Feature Enhancement (MSRFE) with Spectral-wise Multi-head Self-Attention (S-MSA) to achieve dynamic optimization of spatial–spectral features, while the SEM synergistically utilizes attention and convolution to progressively enhance spectral details and mitigate spectral aliasing in low-resolution scenes. Experiments across multiple public datasets demonstrate that CMFREN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on metrics including RMSE, PSNR, SAM, and MRAE, validating its superiority under complex illumination conditions and detail-degraded scenarios.