Unsupervised Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution Guided by Visible Images

Abstract

Remote sensing images are widely used in many applications. However, due to being limited by the sensors, it is difficult to obtain high-resolution (HR) images from remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised cross-domain super-resolution method devoted to reconstructing a low-resolution (LR) remote sensing image guided by an unpaired HR visible natural image. Therefore, an unsupervised visible image-guided remote sensing image super-resolution network (UVRSR) is built. The network is divided into two learnable branches: a visible image-guided branch (VIG) and a remote sensing image-guided branch (RIG). As HR visible images can provide rich textures and sufficient high-frequency information, the purpose of VIG is to treat them as targets and make full use of their advantages in reconstruction. Specially, we first use a CycleGAN to drag the LR visible natural images to the remote sensing domain; then, we apply an SR network to upscale these simulated remote sensing domain LR images. However, the domain gap between SR remote sensing images and HR visible targets is massive. To enforce domain consistency, we propose a novel domain-ruled discriminator in the reconstruction. Furthermore, inspired by the zero-shot super-resolution network (ZSSR) to explore the internal information of remote sensing images, we add a remote sensing domain inner study to train the SR network in RIG. Sufficient experimental works show UVRSR can achieve superior results with state-of-the-art unpaired and remote sensing SR methods on several challenging remote sensing image datasets.