Multi-image Super Resolution of Remotely Sensed Images using Residual Feature Attention Deep Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been consistently proved state-of-the-art results in image Super-Resolution (SR), representing an exceptional opportunity for the remote sensing field to extract further information and knowledge from captured data. However, most of the works published in the literature have been focusing on the Single-Image Super-Resolution problem so far. At present, satellite based remote sensing platforms offer huge data availability with high temporal resolution and low spatial resolution. In this context, the presented research proposes a novel residual attention model (RAMS) that efficiently tackles the multi-image super-resolution task, simultaneously exploiting spatial and temporal correlations to combine multiple images. We introduce the mechanism of visual feature attention with 3D convolutions in order to obtain an aware data fusion and information extraction of the multiple low-resolution images, transcending limitations of the local region of convolutional operations. Moreover, having multiple inputs with the same scene, our representation learning network makes extensive use of nestled residual connections to let flow redundant low-frequency signals and focus the computation on more important high-frequency components. Extensive experimentation and evaluations against other available solutions, either for single or multi-image super-resolution, have demonstrated that the proposed deep learning-based solution can be considered state-of-the-art for Multi-Image Super-Resolution for remote sensing applications

Video and Image Super-Resolution via Deep Learning with Attention Mechanism

Image demosaicing, image super-resolution and video super-resolution are three important tasks in color imaging pipeline. Demosaicing deals with the recovery of missing color information and generation of full-resolution color images from so-called Color filter Array (CFA) such as Bayer pattern. Image super-resolution aims at increasing the spatial resolution and enhance important structures (e.g., edges and textures) in super-resolved images. Both spatial and temporal dependency are important to the task of video super-resolution, which has received increasingly more attention in recent years. Traditional solutions to these three low-level vision tasks lack generalization capability especially for real-world data. Recently, deep learning methods have achieved great success in vision problems including image demosaicing and image/video super-resolution. Conceptually similar to adaptation in model-based approaches, attention has received increasing more usage in deep learning recently. As a tool to reallocate limited computational resources based on the importance of informative components, attention mechanism which includes channel attention, spatial attention, non-local attention, etc. has found successful applications in both highlevel and low-level vision tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, 1) most approaches independently studied super-resolution and demosaicing; little is known about the potential benefit of formulating a joint demosaicing and super-resolution (JDSR) problem; 2) attention mechanism has not been studied for spectral channels of color images in the open literature; 3) current approaches for video super-resolution implement deformable convolution based frame alignment methods and naive spatial attention mechanism. How to exploit attention mechanism in spectral and temporal domains sets up the stage for the research in this dissertation. In this dissertation, we conduct a systematic study about those two issues and make the following contributions: 1) we propose a spatial color attention network (SCAN) designed to jointly exploit the spatial and spectral dependency within color images for single image super-resolution (SISR) problem. We present a spatial color attention module that calibrates important color information for individual color components from output feature maps of residual groups. Experimental results have shown that SCAN has achieved superior performance in terms of both subjective and objective qualities on the NTIRE2019 dataset; 2) we propose two competing end-to-end joint optimization solutions to the JDSR problem: Densely-Connected Squeeze-and-Excitation Residual Network (DSERN) vs. Residual-Dense Squeeze-and-Excitation Network (RDSEN). Experimental results have shown that an enhanced design RDSEN can significantly improve both subjective and objective performance over DSERN; 3) we propose a novel deep learning based framework, Deformable Kernel Spatial Attention Network (DKSAN) to super-resolve videos with a scale factor as large as 16 (the extreme SR situation). Thanks to newly designed Deformable Kernel Convolution Alignment (DKC Align) and Deformable Kernel Spatial Attention (DKSA) modules, DKSAN can get both better subjective and objective results when compared with the existing state-of-the-art approach enhanced deformable convolutional network (EDVR)

Reconstruction of Laser Ultrasonic Wavefield Images from Reduced Sparse Measurements Using Compressed Sensing Aided Super-resolution

Laser ultrasonic imaging is attractive for damage visualization because of its noncontact nature, sensitiveness to local damages, and high spatial resolution . However, its field application is limited as the scanning with high spatial resolution demands a long scanning time. Recently, compressed sensing (CS) and super-resolution are gaining popularity in the image recovery field. CS estimates unmeasured pixels from measured parts, and SR recovers high spatial frequency information from low resolution images. Inspired by these techniques, a laser ultrasonic wavefield reconstruction technique is developed so that damage can be located and visualized with reduced number of ultrasonic measurements. First, a low spatial resolution ultrasonic wavefield image for a given inspection region is reconstructed from reduced number of ultrasonic measurements using CS. Here, the ultrasonic waves are generated using a pulsed laser, and measured at a fixed sensing point using a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV). Then, a high spatial resolution ultrasonic wave image is recovered from the reconstructed low spatial resolution image using SR. The number of measurement points required for ultrasonic wavefield imaging is dramatically reduced. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated through a numerical simulation and an experiment performed on a cracked aluminum plate

Fusformer: A Transformer-based Fusion Approach for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Hyperspectral image has become increasingly crucial due to its abundant spectral information. However, It has poor spatial resolution with the limitation of the current imaging mechanism. Nowadays, many convolutional neural networks have been proposed for the hyperspectral image super-resolution problem. However, convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods only consider the local information instead of the global one with the limited kernel size of receptive field in the convolution operation. In this paper, we design a network based on the transformer for fusing the low-resolution hyperspectral images and high-resolution multispectral images to obtain the high-resolution hyperspectral images. Thanks to the representing ability of the transformer, our approach is able to explore the intrinsic relationships of features globally. Furthermore, considering the LR-HSIs hold the main spectral structure, the network focuses on the spatial detail estimation releasing from the burden of reconstructing the whole data. It reduces the mapping space of the proposed network, which enhances the final performance. Various experiments and quality indexes show our approach's superiority compared with other state-of-the-art methods

Multi-scale residual hierarchical dense networks for single image super-resolution

Single image super-resolution is known to be an ill-posed problem, which has been studied for decades. With the developments of deep convolutional neural networks, the CNN-based single image super-resolution methods have greatly improved the quality of the generated high-resolution images. However, it is difficult for image super-resolution to make full use of the relationship between pixels in low-resolution images. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-scale residual hierarchical dense network, which tries to find the dependencies in multi-level and multi-scale features. Specially, we apply the atrous spatial pyramid pooling, which concatenates multiple atrous convolutions with different dilation rates, and design a residual hierarchical dense structure for single image super-resolution. The atrous-spatial pyramid-pooling module is used for learning the relationship of features at multiple scales; while the residual hierarchical dense structure, which consists of several hierarchical dense blocks with skip connections, aims to adaptively detect key information from multi-level features. Meanwhile, dense features from different groups are connected in a dense approach by hierarchical dense blocks, which can adequately extract local multi-level features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods. The super-resolution results on benchmark datasets of our method can be downloaded from https://github.com/Rainyfish/MS-RHDN, and the source code will be released upon acceptance of the paper