Residual Augmented Attentional U-Shaped Network for Spectral Reconstruction from RGB Images

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to spectral reconstruction (SR) and acquired superior performance. Nevertheless, the existing CNN-based SR approaches integrate hierarchical features from different layers indiscriminately, lacking an investigation of the relationships of intermediate feature maps, which limits the learning power of CNNs. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep residual augmented attentional u-shape network (RA(2)UN) with several double improved residual blocks (DIRB) instead of paired plain convolutional units. Specifically, a trainable spatial augmented attention (SAA) module is developed to bridge the encoder and decoder to emphasize the features in the informative regions. Furthermore, we present a novel channel augmented attention (CAA) module embedded in the DIRB to rescale adaptively and enhance residual learning by using first-order and second-order statistics for stronger feature representations. Finally, a boundary-aware constraint is employed to focus on the salient edge information and recover more accurate high-frequency details. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed RA(2)UN network outperforms the state-of-the-art SR methods under quantitative measurements and perceptual comparison.