Super-Resolution for Overhead Imagery Using DenseNets and Adversarial Learning

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Learning allow for new modalities of image super-resolution by learning low to high resolution mappings. In this paper we present our work using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with applications to overhead and satellite imagery. We have experimented with several state-of-the-art architectures. We propose a GAN-based architecture using densely connected convolutional neural networks (DenseNets) to be able to super-resolve overhead imagery with a factor of up to 8x. We have also investigated resolution limits of these networks. We report results on several publicly available datasets, including SpaceNet data and IARPA Multi-View Stereo Challenge, and compare performance with other state-of-the-art architectures.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, WACV 2018 submissio

A Fully Progressive Approach to Single-Image Super-Resolution

Recent deep learning approaches to single image super-resolution have achieved impressive results in terms of traditional error measures and perceptual quality. However, in each case it remains challenging to achieve high quality results for large upsampling factors. To this end, we propose a method (ProSR) that is progressive both in architecture and training: the network upsamples an image in intermediate steps, while the learning process is organized from easy to hard, as is done in curriculum learning. To obtain more photorealistic results, we design a generative adversarial network (GAN), named ProGanSR, that follows the same progressive multi-scale design principle. This not only allows to scale well to high upsampling factors (e.g., 8x) but constitutes a principled multi-scale approach that increases the reconstruction quality for all upsampling factors simultaneously. In particular ProSR ranks 2nd in terms of SSIM and 4th in terms of PSNR in the NTIRE2018 SISR challenge [34]. Compared to the top-ranking team, our model is marginally lower, but runs 5 times faster