SINGLE-IMAGE SUPER RESOLUTION FOR MULTISPECTRAL REMOTE SENSING DATA USING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract

In optical remote sensing, spatial resolution of images is crucial for numerous applications. Space-borne systems are most likely to be affected by a lack of spatial resolution, due to their natural disadvantage of a large distance between the sensor and the sensed object. Thus, methods for <i>single-image super resolution</i> are desirable to exceed the limits of the sensor. Apart from assisting visual inspection of datasets, post-processing operations—e.g., segmentation or feature extraction—can benefit from detailed and distinguishable structures. In this paper, we show that recently introduced state-of-the-art approaches for single-image super resolution of conventional photographs, making use of <i>deep learning</i> techniques, such as <i>convolutional neural networks</i> (CNN), can successfully be applied to remote sensing data. With a huge amount of training data available, <i>end-to-end learning</i> is reasonably easy to apply and can achieve results unattainable using conventional handcrafted algorithms. <br><br> We trained our CNN on a specifically designed, domain-specific dataset, in order to take into account the special characteristics of multispectral remote sensing data. This dataset consists of publicly available SENTINEL-2 images featuring 13 spectral bands, a ground resolution of up to 10m, and a high radiometric resolution and thus satisfying our requirements in terms of quality and quantity. In experiments, we obtained results superior compared to competing approaches trained on generic image sets, which failed to reasonably scale satellite images with a high radiometric resolution, as well as conventional interpolation methods.