Boosting Image Super-Resolution via Fusion of Complementary Information Captured by Multi-Modal Sensors

Image Super-Resolution (SR) provides a promising technique to enhance the image quality of low-resolution sensors for a wide range of optical applications. It is noted that the costs for capturing high-resolution images in various spectral ranges are significantly different, thus it is reasonable to utilize low-cost channel images (e.g., visible/depth images) as guidance to boost the accuracy of SR results of the expensive channel (e.g., thermal images) significantly. In this paper, we attempt to leverage complementary information from low-cost channels (visible/depth) to boost image quality of an expensive channel (thermal) using fewer parameters. To this end, we first build a multi-modal imaging system and present an effective method to generate pixel-wise aligned visible and thermal images via virtual 3D viewpoint rendering. Then, we design a feature-level multispectral fusion residual network model to perform high-accuracy SR of thermal images by adaptively integrating co-occurrence features presented in multispectral images. Experimental results demonstrate that this novel approach can effectively alleviate the ill-posed inverse problem of image SR by taking into account complementary information from an additional low-cost channel, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art SR approaches in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.