SpecUltra: A Unified Foundation Model for Heterogeneous Spectral Images

Abstract

Spectral imagery, including hyperspectral image (HSI) and multispectral image (MSI), exhibits substantial heterogeneity in band numbers, wavelengths, spectral resolutions, hindering unified modeling and cross-sensor transfer. From the perspective of imaging physics, these heterogeneous observations can be regarded as discrete measurements of an underlying continuous spectrum acquired through different sampling processes. Motivated by this perspective, we propose SpecUltra, a unified foundation model for heterogeneous spectral images. Specifically, SpecUltra employs 3D convolutional tokenization and wavelength-aware 3D RoPE to encode relative wavelength and spatial relationships, enabling fine-grained spatial-spectral modeling within a shared coordinate system. We further construct MultiHyper-200K, a large-scale multi-sensor HSI dataset, and pretrain SpecUltra using auxiliary-token-assisted mask image modeling (MIM), where a level token indicates the radiometric product type and register tokens absorb sensor- and acquisition-dependent variations. To bridge the spectral-granularity gap between HSI and MSI, we introduce Spectral Kernel Transformation (SKT), which transfers pretrained knowledge in parameter space by constructing MSI embedding kernels from fine-grained HSI-pretrained kernel slices. This design preserves pretrained spectral priors while maintaining compatibility with the pretrained backbone. Experiments on HSI and MSI classification and segmentation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance across disparate sensors and downstream tasks.