PHASE: Physiology-Aware Hyperspectral Reconstruction via Object-to-Human Domain Adaptation
About
Although hyperspectral imaging offers unparalleled non-invasive physiological insight, its bulky hardware, slow acquisition, and regulatory burden severely limit its clinical availability. A natural workaround is to reconstruct hyperspectral information from ubiquitous RGB or CASSI measurements. However, existing paradigms, developed for object-centric scenes, rely on reflectance-based feature alignment, assuming that spectral similarity preserves semantic meaning. This assumption breaks down in physiological imaging, where visually similar RGB responses may arise from distinct and entangled physiological states. This mismatch motivates a shift from reflectance alignment to physiology-aware representation learning, grounded in shared light-matter interaction principles -- a shift that introduces fundamental challenges from cross-channel semantic shifts (C1) and irreversible information loss in RGB-based acquisition (C2). We therefore design PHASE, a physiology-aware hyperspectral reconstruction paradigm that fundamentally redefines object-to-human transfer by disentangling cross-channel physiological semantics via Physiological Channel Reinterpretation and restricting reconstruction to physiologically plausible solutions through Physiologically Constrained Alignment. Under two source-to-target transfer protocols, PHASE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to +2.20 SSIM and -3.06 in SAM with merely 1.5% labeled supervision.