Unraveling Metameric Dilemma for Spectral Reconstruction: A High-Fidelity Approach via Semi-Supervised Learning

Spectral reconstruction from RGB images often suffers from a metameric dilemma, where distinct spectral distributions map to nearly identical RGB values, making them indistinguishable to current models and leading to unreliable reconstructions. In this paper, we present Diff-Spectra that integrates supervised physics-aware spectral estimation and unsupervised high-fidelity spectral regularization for HSI reconstruction. We first introduce an Adaptive illumiChroma Decoupling (AICD) module to decouple illumination and chrominance information, which learns intrinsic and distinctive feature distributions, thereby mitigating the metameric issue. Then, we incorporate the AICD into a learnable spectral response function (SRF) guided hyperspectral initial estimation mechanism to mimic the physical image formation and thus inject physics-aware reasoning into neural networks, turning an ill-posed problem into a constrained, interpretable task. We also introduce a metameric spectra augmentation method to synthesize comprehensive hyperspectral data to pre-train a Spectral Diffusion Module (SDM), which internalizes the statistical properties of real-world HSI data, enforcing unsupervised high-fidelity regularization on the spectral transitions via inner-loop optimization during inference. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our Diff-Spectra achieves SOTA performance on both Spectral reconstruction and downstream HSI classification.