Super-resolution of 3D Magnetic Resonance Images by Random Shifting and Convolutional Neural Networks

Enhancing resolution is a permanent goal in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, in order to keep improving diagnostic capability and registration methods. Super-resolution (SR) techniques are applied at the postprocessing stage, and their use and development have progressively increased during the last years. In particular, example-based methods have been mostly proposed in recent state-of-the-art works. In this paper, a combination of a deep-learning SR system and a random shifting technique to improve the quality of MR images is proposed, implemented and tested. The model was compared to four competitors: cubic spline interpolation, non-local means upsampling, low-rank total variation and a three-dimensional convolutional neural network trained with patches of HR brain images (SRCNN3D). The newly proposed method showed better results in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Structural Similarity index, and Bhattacharyya coefficient. Computation times were at the same level as those of these up-to-date methods. When applied to downsampled MR structural T1 images, the new method also yielded better qualitative results, both in the restored images and in the images of residuals.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

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