A Unified Network for Arbitrary Scale Super-Resolution of Video Satellite Images

Super-resolution (SR) has attracted increasing attention as it can improve the quality of video satellite images. Most previous studies only consider several integer magnification factors and focus on obtaining a specific SR model for each scale factor. However, in the real world, it is a common requirement to zoom the videos arbitrarily by rolling the mouse wheel. In this article, we propose a unified network for arbitrary scale SR (ASSR) of video satellite images. The proposed ASSR consists of two modules, i.e., feature learning module and arbitrary upscale module. The feature learning module accepts multiple low-resolution (LR) frames and extracts useful features of those frames by using many 3-D residual blocks. The arbitrary upscale module takes the extracted features as input and enhances the spatial resolution by subpixel convolution and bicubic-based adjustment. Different from existing video satellite image SR methods, ASSR can continuously zoom LR video satellite images with arbitrary integer and noninteger scale factors in a single model. Experiments have been conducted on real video satellite images acquired by Jilin-1 and OVS-1. Quantitative and qualitative results have demonstrated that ASSR has superior reconstruction performance compared with the state-of-the-art SR methods.