Super-resolution rendering for Digital Earth applications

Abstract

Digital Earth rendering applications, such as Google Earth and World Wind, allow us to explore real information of the Earth surface. To show the diverse details of the Earth surface, it requires high resolution satellite images. In some cases obtaining high resolution satellite images cost too much and sometimes there are even no such images for the interesting sites. In this paper, we present a method using example-based super-resolution techniques combined with image analogies framework to improve the visual quality of satellite images. Detailed high resolution and low resolution satellite images of the same site are regarded as example pairs to form a super-resolution filter. The filter effectively improves resolution of low-resolution satellite images. Moreover, it preserves the coherence of the images and improves the performance of the Digital Earth applications as well. The proposed method has been tested on the World Wind, experiment results show the effectiveness of our method.