Super-Resolution of Remote Sensing Images via a Dense Residual Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

Single image super-resolution (SISR) has been widely studied in recent years as a crucial technique for remote sensing applications. In this paper, a dense residual generative adversarial network (DRGAN)-based SISR method is proposed to promote the resolution of remote sensing images. Different from previous super-resolution (SR) approaches based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), the novelty of our method mainly lies in the following factors. First, we made a breakthrough in terms of network architecture to improve performance. We designed a dense residual network as the generative network in GAN, which can make full use of the hierarchical features from low-resolution (LR) images. We also introduced a contiguous memory mechanism into the network to take advantage of the dense residual block. Second, we modified the loss function and altered the model of the discriminative network according to the Wasserstein GAN with a gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) for stable training. Extensive experiments were performed using the NWPU-RESISC45 dataset, and the results demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective evaluation and subjective perspective.