Sensor-Adaptive Infrared Spectral Reconstruction with Plug-and-Play Diffusion Priors

Abstract

Hyperspectral sensing enables material identification; however, state-of-the-art spectrometers are costly and bulky, which limits their use in mobile applications. We address this by proposing sparse spectrum reconstruction from narrowband photocurrents using a pseudoinverse-guided diffusion model ({\Pi}GDM). With {\Pi}GDM we use a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to reconstruct the spectrum, which is trained on a large public spectral dataset to learn realistic spectral priors, eliminating the need for paired sensor measurements. At inference, {\Pi}GDM alternates reverse-diffusion denoising steps with pseudoinverse projection to enforce consistency with measured photocurrents via the calibrated responsivity matrices of sensors. Consequently, our method is sensor-adaptive: when detector arrays change, we simply substitute the responsivity matrix in the pseudoinverse projection without retraining of the diffusion model. The resulting computational spectrometer achieves 1.502% average estimation error, outperforming Tikhonov, Gaussian, compressive-sensing, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) baselines, while providing calibrated uncertainty estimates via Monte Carlo sampling from different random initializations of {\Pi}GDM. Summarizing, our approach offers an accurate, compact alternative for spectral recovery on resource-constrained platforms.