Joint-SRVDNet: Joint Super Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network

In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scaleGenerative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple intermediate outputs with increasingresolutions. Second, a detector is trained on super-resolved images that are upscaled by factor 4x usingMsGAN architecture and finally, the detection loss is minimized jointly with the super-resolution loss toencourage the target detector to be sensitive to the subsequent super-resolution training. The network jointlylearns hierarchical and discriminative features of targets and produces optimal super-resolution results. Weperform both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our proposed network on VEDAI, xView and DOTAdatasets. The experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves better visual quality than thestate-of-the-art methods for aerial super-resolution with 4x up-scaling factor and improves the accuracy ofaerial vehicle detection

Generative Adversarial Network and Its Application in Aerial Vehicle Detection and Biometric Identification System

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown great potential in advancing the state-of-the-art in many areas of computer vision, most notably in image synthesis and manipulation tasks. GAN is a generative model which simultaneously trains a generator and a discriminator in an adversarial manner to produce real-looking synthetic data by capturing the underlying data distribution. Due to its powerful ability to generate high-quality and visually pleasingresults, we apply it to super-resolution and image-to-image translation techniques to address vehicle detection in low-resolution aerial images and cross-spectral cross-resolution iris recognition. First, we develop a Multi-scale GAN (MsGAN) with multiple intermediate outputs, which progressively learns the details and features of the high-resolution aerial images at different scales. Then the upscaled super-resolved aerial images are fed to a You Only Look Once-version 3 (YOLO-v3) object detector and the detection loss is jointly optimized along with a super-resolution loss to emphasize target vehicles sensitive to the super-resolution process. There is another problem that remains unsolved when detection takes place at night or in a dark environment, which requires an IR detector. Training such a detector needs a lot of infrared (IR) images. To address these challenges, we develop a GAN-based joint cross-modal super-resolution framework where low-resolution (LR) IR images are translated and super-resolved to high-resolution (HR) visible (VIS) images before applying detection. This approach significantly improves the accuracy of aerial vehicle detection by leveraging the benefits of super-resolution techniques in a cross-modal domain. Second, to increase the performance and reliability of deep learning-based biometric identification systems, we focus on developing conditional GAN (cGAN) based cross-spectral cross-resolution iris recognition and offer two different frameworks. The first approach trains a cGAN to jointly translate and super-resolve LR near-infrared (NIR) iris images to HR VIS iris images to perform cross-spectral cross-resolution iris matching to the same resolution and within the same spectrum. In the second approach, we design a coupled GAN (cpGAN) architecture to project both VIS and NIR iris images into a low-dimensional embedding domain. The goal of this architecture is to ensure maximum pairwise similarity between the feature vectors from the two iris modalities of the same subject. We have also proposed a pose attention-guided coupled profile-to-frontal face recognition network to learn discriminative and pose-invariant features in an embedding subspace. To show that the feature vectors learned by this deep subspace can be used for other tasks beyond recognition, we implement a GAN architecture which is able to reconstruct a frontal face from its corresponding profile face. This capability can be used in various face analysis tasks, such as emotion detection and expression tracking, where having a frontal face image can improve accuracy and reliability. Overall, our research works have shown its efficacy by achieving new state-of-the-art results through extensive experiments on publicly available datasets reported in the literature

Implementation of Super Resolution Techniques in Geospatial Satellite Imagery

The potential for more precise land cover classifications and pattern analysis is provided by technological advancements and the growing accessibility of high-resolution satellite images, which might significantly improve the detection and quantification of land cover change for conservation.  A group of methods known as "super-resolution imaging" use generative modelling to increase the resolution of an imaging system. Super-Resolution Imaging, which falls under the category of sophisticated computer vision and image processing, has a variety of practical uses, including astronomical imaging, surveillance and security, medical imaging, and satellite imaging. As computer vision is where deep learning algorithms for super-resolution first appeared, they were mostly created on RGB images in 8-bit colour depth, where the sensor and camera are separated by a few meters. But no evaluation of these methods has been done

Underwater Image Super-Resolution using Deep Residual Multipliers

We present a deep residual network-based generative model for single image super-resolution (SISR) of underwater imagery for use by autonomous underwater robots. We also provide an adversarial training pipeline for learning SISR from paired data. In order to supervise the training, we formulate an objective function that evaluates the \textit{perceptual quality} of an image based on its global content, color, and local style information. Additionally, we present USR-248, a large-scale dataset of three sets of underwater images of 'high' (640x480) and 'low' (80x60, 160x120, and 320x240) spatial resolution. USR-248 contains paired instances for supervised training of 2x, 4x, or 8x SISR models. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed model through qualitative and quantitative experiments and compare the results with several state-of-the-art models' performances. We also analyze its practical feasibility for applications such as scene understanding and attention modeling in noisy visual conditions

Generative Adversarial Super-Resolution at the Edge with Knowledge Distillation

Single-Image Super-Resolution can support robotic tasks in environments where a reliable visual stream is required to monitor the mission, handle teleoperation or study relevant visual details. In this work, we propose an efficient Generative Adversarial Network model for real-time Super-Resolution. We adopt a tailored architecture of the original SRGAN and model quantization to boost the execution on CPU and Edge TPU devices, achieving up to 200 fps inference. We further optimize our model by distilling its knowledge to a smaller version of the network and obtain remarkable improvements compared to the standard training approach. Our experiments show that our fast and lightweight model preserves considerably satisfying image quality compared to heavier state-of-the-art models. Finally, we conduct experiments on image transmission with bandwidth degradation to highlight the advantages of the proposed system for mobile robotic applications

License Plate Super-Resolution Using Diffusion Models

In surveillance, accurately recognizing license plates is hindered by their often low quality and small dimensions, compromising recognition precision. Despite advancements in AI-based image super-resolution, methods like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) still fall short in enhancing license plate images. This study leverages the cutting-edge diffusion model, which has consistently outperformed other deep learning techniques in image restoration. By training this model using a curated dataset of Saudi license plates, both in low and high resolutions, we discovered the diffusion model's superior efficacy. The method achieves a 12.55\% and 37.32% improvement in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) over SwinIR and ESRGAN, respectively. Moreover, our method surpasses these techniques in terms of Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), registering a 4.89% and 17.66% improvement over SwinIR and ESRGAN, respectively. Furthermore, 92% of human evaluators preferred our images over those from other algorithms. In essence, this research presents a pioneering solution for license plate super-resolution, with tangible potential for surveillance systems