Spectral Super-Resolution via Adversarial Unfolding and Data-Driven Spectrum Regularization: From Multispectral Satellite Data to NASA Hyperspectral Image

The European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite provides global multispectral coverage for remote sensing (RS) applications. However, limited spectral resolution (12 bands) and non-unified spatial resolution (60/20/10 m) restrict their practicality. In contrast, the high spectral-spatial resolution sensor (e.g., NASA's AVIRIS-NG) covers only the American region due to practical considerations. This raises a fundamental question: ``Can a global hyperspectral coverage be achieved by reconstructing Sentinel-2 data to NASA hyperspectral images?'' This study aims to achieve spectral super-resolution from 12-to-186 and unify the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 data to 5 m. To enable a reliable and efficient reconstruction, we formulate a novel deep unfolding framework regularized by a data-driven spectrum prior from PriorNet, instead of relying on implicit deep priors as conventional deep unfolding does. Moreover, an adversarial term is integrated into the unfolded architecture, enabling the discriminator to guide the reconstruction in both the training and testing phases; we term this novel concept unfolding adversarial learning (UAL). Experiments show that our UALNet outperforms the next-best Transformer in PSNR, SSIM, and SAM, while requiring only 15\% MACs and 20 times fewer parameters.