Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Spatial–Spectral Recurrent Transformer

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from noise arising from both intra-imaging mechanisms and environmental factors. Leveraging domain knowledge specific to HSIs, such as global spectral correlation (GSC) and non-local spatial self-similarity (NSS), is crucial for effective denoising. Existing methods tend to independently utilize each of these knowledge components with multiple blocks, overlooking the inherent 3D nature of HSIs where domain knowledge is strongly interlinked, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a spatial-spectral recurrent transformer U-Net (SSRT-UNet) for HSI denoising. The proposed SSRT-UNet integrates NSS and GSC properties within a single SSRT block. This block consists of a spatial branch and a spectral branch. The spectral branch employs a combination of transformer and recurrent neural network to perform recurrent computations across bands, allowing for GSC exploitation beyond a fixed number of bands. Concurrently, the spatial branch encodes NSS for each band by sharing keys and values with the spectral branch under the guidance of GSC. This interaction between the two branches enables the joint utilization of NSS and GSC, avoiding their independent treatment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms several alternative approaches. The source code will be available at https://github.com/lronkitty/SSRT.