Long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral observations contain distance-dependent atmospheric absorption signatures, providing a physical basis for long-range passive ranging. However, in natural scenes, these signatures are nonlinearly coupled with target temperature, material emissivity, and path radiance, making distance inversion from observed radiance ill posed. Existing methods typically rely on full-band measurements and pixel-wise joint optimization, which is computationally expensive and does not explicitly exploit sharp atmospheric absorption structures. This paper proposes an Absorption-Guided Distance-Decoupled Estimation and Refinement (ADER) framework for LWIR hyperspectral passive ranging. ADER represents emissivity with B-spline control points under a smoothness prior, suppressing overfitting to atmospheric absorption structures and enabling distance-decoupled estimation. It further uses ozone-absorption cues to classify pixels into emission-dominant and reflection-dominant groups. For emission-dominant pixels, ADER compensates path radiance and transmittance and estimates distance by one-dimensional absorption-residual minimization. For reflection-dominant pixels, ADER refines the initial estimate using downwelling-radiance compensation based on the complete radiative model. To reduce spectral redundancy, ADER also introduces a greedy band selection strategy based on multi-scene effective Fisher information for the distance parameter. Experiments on real scenes show that ADER recovers LiDAR-consistent spatial distance structures under both full-band and 20-band settings, improves ranging accuracy in the evaluated regions, and achieves approximately two orders of magnitude speedup over a public full-band hyperspectral ranging method.
Hyperspectral band selection methods based on differentiable selectors can be sensitive to initialization and to extracting a final discrete subset, while prescribed band counts limit flexibility. We propose SGBR-HC (Spectral-Group Band Ranking with Hard-Concrete initialization), a two-stage method that uses a supervised spectral ranking to initialize trainable sparse gates rather than treating ranking as a fixed selection rule, letting the number of selected bands be determined by training. Stage-1 scores candidate bands from training pixels by class discriminability and spectral diversity; this ranking seeds the gate logits for Stage-2, which trains the sparse gates jointly with a spatial classifier. Under spatially disjoint evaluation on Pavia University and Houston 2013, verified by retraining a fresh classifier on the selected bands, SGBR-HC achieves the highest mean overall accuracy and Cohen's kappa with approximately twenty bands. Bypassing Stage-1 degrades OA by 8.84 pp on Pavia University and 22.15 pp on Houston 2013, confirming the ranking prior's role. Random pixel splits inflate OA on Pavia University by 30.56 pp, underscoring spatial leakage as a critical evaluation confound.