FAST AND ACCURATE MULTI-FRAME SUPER-RESOLUTION OF SATELLITE IMAGES

Abstract. Recent constellations of small satellites, such as Planet’s SkySats, offer new acquisition modes where very short videos or bursts of images are acquired instead of a single still image. Compared to sequences of multi-date images, these sequences of consecutive video frames yield a large redundancy of information within the range of seconds. This redundancy enables to increase the spatial resolution using multi-frame super-resolution algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel super-resolution method based on a high-order spline interpolation model that combines multiple low-resolution frames to produce a high-resolution image. Moreover this method can be implemented efficiently on GPU to process entire images from real satellite acquisitions. Synthetic and real experiments show that the proposed method is able to recover fine details, and measurements of the resulting resolution indicate a gain of 10 cm / pixel with respect to Planet’s SkySat standard imagery products.