A COMPARISON OF DEEP LEARNING-BASED SUPER-RESOLUTION FRAMEWORKS FOR SENTINEL-2 IMAGERY IN URBAN AREAS

Abstract. The high-resolution images are in demand for many applications in the monitoring of urban areas. The advent of remote sensing satellites such as Sentinel-2 has made data more accessible as it provides free multispectral imagery. However, the spatial resolution of these images is not sufficient for many of the tasks. With the advent of deep learning techniques, significant progress has been made in the field of super-resolution, which has shown promising results in the improvement of the spatial resolution of satellite images. In this study, we compare four the most common deep learning-based models for the super-resolution of Sentinel-2 imagery in dense urban areas using aerial images. These methods are including enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR), super-resolution generative adversarial networks (ESRGAN), residual feature distillation network (RFDN), and Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN). To determine the effectiveness of the models in improving image resolution, they were evaluated using visual quality and quantitative metrics. The super-resolution results show that deep learning-based models have high potential for the generation of the high-resolution dataset from Sentinel-2 imagery in urban areas. The RFDN outperformed other deep learning-based models that achieved the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) more than 17.8.