Cascaded Deep Networks With Multiple Receptive Fields for Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Infrared images have a wide range of military and civilian applications, including night vision, surveillance, and robotics. However, high-resolution infrared detectors are difficult to fabricate and their manufacturing cost is expensive. In this paper, we present a cascaded architecture of deep neural networks with multiple receptive fields to increase the spatial resolution of infrared images by a large scale factor ( $\times 8$ ). Instead of reconstructing a high-resolution image from its low-resolution version using a single complex deep network, the key idea of our approach is to set up a mid-point (scale $\times 2$ ) between scale $\times 1$ and $\times 8$ such that lost information can be divided into two components. Lost information within each component contains similar patterns thus can be more accurately recovered even using a simpler deep network. In our proposed cascaded architecture, two consecutive deep networks with different receptive fields are jointly trained through a multi-scale loss function. The first network with a large receptive field is applied to recover large-scale structure information, while the second one uses a relatively smaller receptive field to reconstruct small-scale image details. Our proposed method is systematically evaluated using realistic infrared images. Compared with state-of-the-art super-resolution methods, our proposed cascaded approach achieves improved reconstruction accuracy using significantly fewer parameters.