scholarly journals Making Low-Resolution Satellite Images Reborn: A Deep Learning Approach for Super-Resolution Building Extraction

Author(s):  
Lixian Zhang ◽  
Runmin Dong ◽  
Shuai Yuan ◽  
Weijia Li ◽  
Juepeng Zheng ◽  
...  

Existing methods for building extraction from remotely sensed images strongly rely on aerial or satellite-based images with very high resolution, which are usually limited by spatiotemporally accessibility and cost. In contrast, relatively low-resolution images have better spatial and temporal availability but cannot directly contribute to fine- and/or high-resolution building extraction. In this paper, based on image super-resolution and segmentation techniques, we propose a two-stage framework (SRBuildingSeg) for achieving super-resolution (SR) building extraction using relatively low-resolution remotely sensed images. SRBuildingSeg can fully utilize inherent information from the given low-resolution images to achieve high-resolution building extraction. In contrast to the existing building extraction methods, we first utilize an internal pairs generation module (IPG) to obtain SR training datasets from the given low-resolution images and an edge-aware super-resolution module (EASR) to improve the perceptional features, following the dual-encoder building segmentation module (DES). Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of achieving high-resolution (e.g. 0.5 m) building extraction results at 2×, 4× and 8× SR. Our approach outperforms 8 other methods with respect to the extraction result of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) values by a ratio of 9.38%, 8.20% and 7.89% with SR ratio factors of 2, 4, and 8, respectively. The results indicate that the edges and borders reconstructed in super-resolved images serve a pivotal role in subsequent building extraction and reveal the potential of the proposed approach to achieve super-resolution building extraction. Our code is available at https://github.com/xian1234/SRBuildSeg.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 2872
Author(s):  
Lixian Zhang ◽  
Runmin Dong ◽  
Shuai Yuan ◽  
Weijia Li ◽  
Juepeng Zheng ◽  
...  

Existing methods for building extraction from remotely sensed images strongly rely on aerial or satellite-based images with very high resolution, which are usually limited by spatiotemporally accessibility and cost. In contrast, relatively low-resolution images have better spatial and temporal availability but cannot directly contribute to fine- and/or high-resolution building extraction. In this paper, based on image super-resolution and segmentation techniques, we propose a two-stage framework (SRBuildingSeg) for achieving super-resolution (SR) building extraction using relatively low-resolution remotely sensed images. SRBuildingSeg can fully utilize inherent information from the given low-resolution images to achieve high-resolution building extraction. In contrast to the existing building extraction methods, we first utilize an internal pairs generation module (IPG) to obtain SR training datasets from the given low-resolution images and an edge-aware super-resolution module (EASR) to improve the perceptional features, following the dual-encoder building segmentation module (DES). Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of achieving high-resolution (e.g., 0.5 m) building extraction results at 2×, 4× and 8× SR. Our approach outperforms eight other methods with respect to the extraction result of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) values by a ratio of 9.38%, 8.20%, and 7.89% with SR ratio factors of 2, 4, and 8, respectively. The results indicate that the edges and borders reconstructed in super-resolved images serve a pivotal role in subsequent building extraction and reveal the potential of the proposed approach to achieve super-resolution building extraction.


Author(s):  
Dong Seon Cheng ◽  
Marco Cristani ◽  
Vittorio Murino

Image super-resolution is one of the most appealing applications of image processing, capable of retrieving a high resolution image by fusing several registered low resolution images depicting an object of interest. However, employing super-resolution in video data is challenging: a video sequence generally contains a lot of scattered information regarding several objects of interest in cluttered scenes. Especially with hand-held cameras, the overall quality may be poor due to low resolution or unsteadiness. The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate why standard image super-resolution fails in video data, which are the problems that arise, and how we can overcome these problems. In our first contribution, we propose a novel Bayesian framework for super-resolution of persistent objects of interest in video sequences. We call this process Distillation. In the traditional formulation of the image super-resolution problem, the observed target is (1) always the same, (2) acquired using a camera making small movements, and (3) found in a number of low resolution images sufficient to recover high-frequency information. These assumptions are usually unsatisfied in real world video acquisitions and often beyond the control of the video operator. With Distillation, we aim to extend and to generalize the image super-resolution task, embedding it in a structured framework that accurately distills all the informative bits of an object of interest. In practice, the Distillation process: i) individuates, in a semi supervised way, a set of objects of interest, clustering the related video frames and registering them with respect to global rigid transformations; ii) for each one, produces a high resolution image, by weighting each pixel according to the information retrieved about the object of interest. As a second contribution, we extend the Distillation process to deal with objects of interest whose transformations in the appearance are not (only) rigid. Such process, built on top of the Distillation, is hierarchical, in the sense that a process of clustering is applied recursively, beginning with the analysis of whole frames, and selectively focusing on smaller sub-regions whose isolated motion can be reasonably assumed as rigid. The ultimate product of the overall process is a strip of images that describe at high resolution the dynamics of the video, switching between alternative local descriptions in response to visual changes. Our approach is first tested on synthetic data, obtaining encouraging comparative results with respect to known super-resolution techniques, and a good robustness against noise. Second, real data coming from different videos are considered, trying to solve the major details of the objects in motion.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (23) ◽  
pp. 7903
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hassan Maqsood ◽  
Rafia Mumtaz ◽  
Ihsan Ul Haq ◽  
Uferah Shafi ◽  
Syed Mohammad Hassan Zaidi ◽  
...  

Wheat yellow rust is a common agricultural disease that affects the crop every year across the world. The disease not only negatively impacts the quality of the yield but the quantity as well, which results in adverse impact on economy and food supply. It is highly desired to develop methods for fast and accurate detection of yellow rust in wheat crop; however, high-resolution images are not always available which hinders the ability of trained models in detection tasks. The approach presented in this study harnesses the power of super-resolution generative adversarial networks (SRGAN) for upsampling the images before using them to train deep learning models for the detection of wheat yellow rust. After preprocessing the data for noise removal, SRGANs are used for upsampling the images to increase their resolution which helps convolutional neural network (CNN) in learning high-quality features during training. This study empirically shows that SRGANs can be used effectively to improve the quality of images and produce significantly better results when compared with models trained using low-resolution images. This is evident from the results obtained on upsampled images, i.e., 83% of overall test accuracy, which are substantially better than the overall test accuracy achieved for low-resolution images, i.e., 75%. The proposed approach can be used in other real-world scenarios where images are of low resolution due to the unavailability of high-resolution camera in edge devices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2308
Author(s):  
Masoomeh Aslahishahri ◽  
Kevin G. Stanley ◽  
Hema Duddu ◽  
Steve Shirtliffe ◽  
Sally Vail ◽  
...  

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging is a promising data acquisition technique for image-based plant phenotyping. However, UAV images have a lower spatial resolution than similarly equipped in field ground-based vehicle systems, such as carts, because of their distance from the crop canopy, which can be particularly problematic for measuring small-sized plant features. In this study, the performance of three deep learning-based super resolution models, employed as a pre-processing tool to enhance the spatial resolution of low resolution images of three different kinds of crops were evaluated. To train a super resolution model, aerial images employing two separate sensors co-mounted on a UAV flown over lentil, wheat and canola breeding trials were collected. A software workflow to pre-process and align real-world low resolution and high-resolution images and use them as inputs and targets for training super resolution models was created. To demonstrate the effectiveness of real-world images, three different experiments employing synthetic images, manually downsampled high resolution images, or real-world low resolution images as input to the models were conducted. The performance of the super resolution models demonstrates that the models trained with synthetic images cannot generalize to real-world images and fail to reproduce comparable images with the targets. However, the same models trained with real-world datasets can reconstruct higher-fidelity outputs, which are better suited for measuring plant phenotypes.


Author(s):  
Xiongxiong Xue ◽  
Zhenqi Han ◽  
Weiqin Tong ◽  
Mingqi Li ◽  
Lizhuang Liu

Video super-resolution, which utilizes the relevant information of several low-resolution frames to generate high-resolution images, is a challenging task. One possible solution called sliding window method tries to divide the generation of high-resolution video sequences into independent sub-tasks, and only adjacent low-resolution images are used to estimate the high-resolution version of the central low-resolution image. Another popular method named recurrent algorithm proposes to utilize not only the low-resolution images but also the generated high-resolution images of previous frames to generate the high-resolution image. However, both methods have some unavoidable disadvantages. The former one usually leads to bad temporal consistency and requires higher computational cost while the latter method always can not make full use of information contained by optical flow or any other calculated features. Thus more investigations need to be done to explore the balance between these two methods. In this work, a bidirectional frame recurrent video super-resolution method is proposed. To be specific, a reverse training is proposed that the generated high-resolution frame is also utilized to help estimate the high-resolution version of the former frame. With the contribution of reverse training and the forward training, the idea of bidirectional recurrent method not only guarantees the temporal consistency but also make full use of the adjacent information due to the bidirectional training operation while the computational cost is acceptable. Experimental results demonstrate that the bidirectional super-resolution framework gives remarkable performance that it solves the time-related problems when the generated high-resolution image is impressive compared with recurrent-based video super-resolution method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5533
Author(s):  
Shanshan Liu ◽  
Minghui Wang ◽  
Qingbin Huang ◽  
Xia Liu

It is difficult to improve image resolution in hardware due to the limitations of technology and too high costs, but most application fields need high resolution images, so super-resolution technology has been produced. This paper mainly uses information redundancy to realize multi-frame super-resolution. In recent years, many researchers have proposed a variety of multi-frame super-resolution methods, but it is very difficult to preserve the image edge and texture details and remove the influence of noise effectively in practical applications. In this paper, a minimum variance method is proposed to select the low resolution images with appropriate quality quickly for super-resolution. The half-quadratic function is used as the loss function to minimize the observation error between the estimated high resolution image and low-resolution images. The function parameter is determined adaptively according to observation errors of each low-resolution image. The combination of a local structure tensor and Bilateral Total Variation (BTV) as image prior knowledge preserves the details of the image and suppresses the noise simultaneously. The experimental results on synthetic data and real data show that our proposed method can better preserve the details of the image than the existing methods.


Author(s):  
Xin Jin ◽  
Jianfeng Xu ◽  
Kazuyuki Tasaka ◽  
Zhibo Chen

In this article, we address the degraded image super-resolution problem in a multi-task learning (MTL) manner. To better share representations between multiple tasks, we propose an all-in-one collaboration framework (ACF) with a learnable “junction” unit to handle two major problems that exist in MTL—“How to share” and “How much to share.” Specifically, ACF consists of a sharing phase and a reconstruction phase. Considering the intrinsic characteristic of multiple image degradations, we propose to first deal with the compression artifact, motion blur, and spatial structure information of the input image in parallel under a three-branch architecture in the sharing phase. Subsequently, in the reconstruction phase, we up-sample the previous features for high-resolution image reconstruction with a channel-wise and spatial attention mechanism. To coordinate two phases, we introduce a learnable “junction” unit with a dual-voting mechanism to selectively filter or preserve shared feature representations that come from sharing phase, learning an optimal combination for the following reconstruction phase. Finally, a curriculum learning-based training scheme is further proposed to improve the convergence of the whole framework. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world low-resolution images show that the proposed all-in-one collaboration framework not only produces favorable high-resolution results while removing serious degradation, but also has high computational efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We also have applied ACF to some image-quality sensitive practical task, such as pose estimation, to improve estimation accuracy of low-resolution images.


Author(s):  
R. S. Hansen ◽  
D. W. Waldram ◽  
T. Q. Thai ◽  
R. B. Berke

Abstract Background High-resolution Digital Image Correlation (DIC) measurements have previously been produced by stitching of neighboring images, which often requires short working distances. Separately, the image processing community has developed super resolution (SR) imaging techniques, which improve resolution by combining multiple overlapping images. Objective This work investigates the novel pairing of super resolution with digital image correlation, as an alternative method to produce high-resolution full-field strain measurements. Methods First, an image reconstruction test is performed, comparing the ability of three previously published SR algorithms to replicate a high-resolution image. Second, an applied translation is compared against DIC measurement using both low- and super-resolution images. Third, a ring sample is mechanically deformed and DIC strain measurements from low- and super-resolution images are compared. Results SR measurements show improvements compared to low-resolution images, although they do not perfectly replicate the high-resolution image. SR-DIC demonstrates reduced error and improved confidence in measuring rigid body translation when compared to low resolution alternatives, and it also shows improvement in spatial resolution for strain measurements of ring deformation. Conclusions Super resolution imaging can be effectively paired with Digital Image Correlation, offering improved spatial resolution, reduced error, and increased measurement confidence.


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