scholarly journals Mapping the Unseen: Exploiting Super-Resolution for Semantic Segmentation in Low-Resolution Images

Author(s):  
Matheus B. Pereira ◽  
Jefersson Alex Dos Santos

High-resolution aerial images are usually not accessible or affordable. On the other hand, low-resolution remote sensing data is easily found in public open repositories. The problem is that the low-resolution representation can compromise pattern recognition algorithms, especially semantic segmentation. In this M.Sc. dissertation1 , we design two frameworks in order to evaluate the effectiveness of super-resolution in the semantic segmentation of low-resolution remote sensing images. We carried out an extensive set of experiments on different remote sensing datasets. The results show that super-resolution is effective to improve semantic segmentation performance on low-resolution aerial imagery, outperforming unsupervised interpolation and achieving semantic segmentation results comparable to highresolution data.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3152
Author(s):  
Luc Courtrai ◽  
Minh-Tan Pham ◽  
Sébastien Lefèvre

This article tackles the problem of detecting small objects in satellite or aerial remote sensing images by relying on super-resolution to increase image spatial resolution, thus the size and details of objects to be detected. We show how to improve the super-resolution framework starting from the learning of a generative adversarial network (GAN) based on residual blocks and then its integration into a cycle model. Furthermore, by adding to the framework an auxiliary network tailored for object detection, we considerably improve the learning and the quality of our final super-resolution architecture, and more importantly increase the object detection performance. Besides the improvement dedicated to the network architecture, we also focus on the training of super-resolution on target objects, leading to an object-focused approach. Furthermore, the proposed strategies do not depend on the choice of a baseline super-resolution framework, hence could be adopted for current and future state-of-the-art models. Our experimental study on small vehicle detection in remote sensing data conducted on both aerial and satellite images (i.e., ISPRS Potsdam and xView datasets) confirms the effectiveness of the improved super-resolution methods to assist with the small object detection tasks.


Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for the small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and used different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the GAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on car overhead with context and oil and gas storage tank (created by us) data sets show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.


2018 ◽  
Vol 232 ◽  
pp. 02040
Author(s):  
Fuzhen Zhu ◽  
Xin Huang ◽  
Yue Liu ◽  
Haitao Zhu

In order to obtain higher quality super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) of remote sensing images, an improved sparse representation remote sensing images SRR method is proposed in this paper. First, low-resolution image is processed by improved feature extract operator. The high-resolution image and low-resolution image blocks have the same sparse representation coefficient, so the SRR image with higher spatial resolution can be derived from the sparse representation coefficients which have been obtained from low-resolution image. The improved feature extraction operator is a method to get more detail and texture information from the training images. Experiment results show that more texture details can be obtained in the result of SRR remote sensing images subjectively. At the same time, the objective evaluation parameters are improved greatly. The peak PSNR is increased about 2.50dB and 0.50 dB, RMSE is decreased about 2.80 and 0.3 compared with bicubic interpolation algorithm and Ref[8] algorithm respectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1104
Author(s):  
Yuanfu Gong ◽  
Puyun Liao ◽  
Xiaodong Zhang ◽  
Lifei Zhang ◽  
Guanzhou Chen ◽  
...  

Previously, generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been widely applied on super resolution reconstruction (SRR) methods, which turn low-resolution (LR) images into high-resolution (HR) ones. However, as these methods recover high frequency information with what they observed from the other images, they tend to produce artifacts when processing unfamiliar images. Optical satellite remote sensing images are of a far more complicated scene than natural images. Therefore, applying the previous networks on remote sensing images, especially mid-resolution ones, leads to unstable convergence and thus unpleasing artifacts. In this paper, we propose Enlighten-GAN for SRR tasks on large-size optical mid-resolution remote sensing images. Specifically, we design the enlighten blocks to induce network converging to a reliable point, and bring the Self-Supervised Hierarchical Perceptual Loss to attain performance improvement overpassing the other loss functions. Furthermore, limited by memory, large-scale images need to be cropped into patches to get through the network separately. To merge the reconstructed patches into a whole, we employ the internal inconsistency loss and cropping-and-clipping strategy, to avoid the seam line. Experiment results certify that Enlighten-GAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of gradient similarity metric (GSM) on mid-resolution Sentinel-2 remote sensing images.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 3167
Author(s):  
Lize Zhang ◽  
Wen Lu ◽  
Yuanfei Huang ◽  
Xiaopeng Sun ◽  
Hongyi Zhang

Mainstream image super-resolution (SR) methods are generally based on paired training samples. As the high-resolution (HR) remote sensing images are difficult to collect with a limited imaging device, most of the existing remote sensing super-resolution methods try to down-sample the collected original images to generate an auxiliary low-resolution (LR) image and form a paired pseudo HR-LR dataset for training. However, the distribution of the generated LR images is generally inconsistent with the real images due to the limitation of remote sensing imaging devices. In this paper, we propose a perceptually unpaired super-resolution method by constructing a multi-stage aggregation network (MSAN). The optimization of the network depends on consistency losses. In particular, the first phase is to preserve the contents of the super-resolved results, by constraining the content consistency between the down-scaled SR results and the low-quality low-resolution inputs. The second stage minimizes perceptual feature loss between the current result and LR input to constrain perceptual-content consistency. The final phase employs the generative adversarial network (GAN) to adding photo-realistic textures by constraining perceptual-distribution consistency. Numerous experiments on synthetic remote sensing datasets and real remote sensing images show that our method obtains more plausible results than other SR methods quantitatively and qualitatively. The PSNR of our network is 0.06dB higher than the SOTA method—HAN on the UC Merced test set with complex degradation.


Author(s):  
Jakaria Rabbi ◽  
Nilanjan Ray ◽  
Matthias Schubert ◽  
Subir Chowdhury ◽  
Dennis Chao

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3710
Author(s):  
Abolfazl Abdollahi ◽  
Biswajeet Pradhan ◽  
Nagesh Shukla ◽  
Subrata Chakraborty ◽  
Abdullah Alamri

Terrestrial features extraction, such as roads and buildings from aerial images using an automatic system, has many usages in an extensive range of fields, including disaster management, change detection, land cover assessment, and urban planning. This task is commonly tough because of complex scenes, such as urban scenes, where buildings and road objects are surrounded by shadows, vehicles, trees, etc., which appear in heterogeneous forms with lower inter-class and higher intra-class contrasts. Moreover, such extraction is time-consuming and expensive to perform by human specialists manually. Deep convolutional models have displayed considerable performance for feature segmentation from remote sensing data in the recent years. However, for the large and continuous area of obstructions, most of these techniques still cannot detect road and building well. Hence, this work’s principal goal is to introduce two novel deep convolutional models based on UNet family for multi-object segmentation, such as roads and buildings from aerial imagery. We focused on buildings and road networks because these objects constitute a huge part of the urban areas. The presented models are called multi-level context gating UNet (MCG-UNet) and bi-directional ConvLSTM UNet model (BCL-UNet). The proposed methods have the same advantages as the UNet model, the mechanism of densely connected convolutions, bi-directional ConvLSTM, and squeeze and excitation module to produce the segmentation maps with a high resolution and maintain the boundary information even under complicated backgrounds. Additionally, we implemented a basic efficient loss function called boundary-aware loss (BAL) that allowed a network to concentrate on hard semantic segmentation regions, such as overlapping areas, small objects, sophisticated objects, and boundaries of objects, and produce high-quality segmentation maps. The presented networks were tested on the Massachusetts building and road datasets. The MCG-UNet improved the average F1 accuracy by 1.85%, and 1.19% and 6.67% and 5.11% compared with UNet and BCL-UNet for road and building extraction, respectively. Additionally, the presented MCG-UNet and BCL-UNet networks were compared with other state-of-the-art deep learning-based networks, and the results proved the superiority of the networks in multi-object segmentation tasks.


Photonics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 431
Author(s):  
Yuwu Wang ◽  
Guobing Sun ◽  
Shengwei Guo

With the widespread use of remote sensing images, low-resolution target detection in remote sensing images has become a hot research topic in the field of computer vision. In this paper, we propose a Target Detection on Super-Resolution Reconstruction (TDoSR) method to solve the problem of low target recognition rates in low-resolution remote sensing images under foggy conditions. The TDoSR method uses the Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) to perform defogging and super-resolution reconstruction of foggy low-resolution remote sensing images. In the target detection part, the Rotation Equivariant Detector (ReDet) algorithm, which has a higher recognition rate at this stage, is used to identify and classify various types of targets. While a large number of experiments have been carried out on the remote sensing image dataset DOTA-v1.5, the results of this paper suggest that the proposed method achieves good results in the target detection of low-resolution foggy remote sensing images. The principal result of this paper demonstrates that the recognition rate of the TDoSR method increases by roughly 20% when compared with low-resolution foggy remote sensing images.


Author(s):  
Victor Carneiro Lima ◽  
Renato da Rocha Lopes

Super-resolution algorithms, specially when applied in remote sensing, are widely used for many purposes as defense and agricultural research. Classical super-resolution algorithms use multiple low-resolution (LR) images of the target to extract information and use them to build a new image of superior resolution. The LR sources must differ in the sub-pixel range. In contrast, this paper applies an iterative process, using a single LR image to produce a high resolution image.


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