Super-Resolution for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images Based on the 3D Attention-SRGAN Network

Abstract

Hyperspectral remote sensing images (HSIs) have a higher spectral resolution compared to multispectral remote sensing images, providing the possibility for more reasonable and effective analysis and processing of spectral data. However, rich spectral information usually comes at the expense of low spatial resolution owing to the physical limitations of sensors, which brings difficulties for identifying and analyzing targets in HSIs. In the super-resolution (SR) field, many methods have been focusing on the restoration of the spatial information while ignoring the spectral aspect. To better restore the spectral information in the HSI SR field, a novel super-resolution (SR) method was proposed in this study. Firstly, we innovatively used three-dimensional (3D) convolution based on SRGAN (Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network) structure to not only exploit the spatial features but also preserve spectral properties in the process of SR. Moreover, we used the attention mechanism to deal with the multiply features from the 3D convolution layers, and we enhanced the output of our model by improving the content of the generator’s loss function. The experimental results indicate that the 3DASRGAN (3D Attention-based Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network) is both visually quantitatively better than the comparison methods, which proves that the 3DASRGAN model can reconstruct high-resolution HSIs with high efficiency.