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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-215-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Evaluating Super-Resolution Models for Real-World Sentinel-2 Applications: A Case Study</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Mühlhaus</surname>
<given-names>Ron</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jangir</surname>
<given-names>Sandeep Kumar</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0466-2144</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Curreli</surname>
<given-names>Cecilia</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Karlshöfer</surname>
<given-names>Paul</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cremers</surname>
<given-names>Daniel</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>08</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-3-2026</volume>
<fpage>215</fpage>
<lpage>222</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ron Mühlhaus et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/215/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-215-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/215/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-215-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/215/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-215-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-3-2026/215/2026/isprs-annals-XI-3-2026-215-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>High-resolution Earth observation data are crucial for applications such as agriculture, urban planning, and environmental monitoring. Although commercial satellites provide sub-meter imagery, open-access alternatives like Sentinel-2 are limited to resolutions around 10 m ground sampling distance, which is insufficient for many tasks. In this work, we investigate image super-resolution as a method to bridge this gap, enhancing downstream performance on freely available satellite data. We leverage two 16-bit single-band datasets, consisting of Sentinel-2 (20 m&amp;rarr;10 m) and VEN&amp;mu;S (10 m&amp;rarr;5 m) images, to train and benchmark state-of-the-art SR methods, including transformer- and diffusion-based approaches, across multiple dataset mixes. These models are evaluated quantitatively using reference-based metrics (PSNR, SSIM) using ground-truth and no-reference scores (FID, NIQE) for native upscaling from 20 m&amp;rarr;10 m and 10 m&amp;rarr;5 m. We observe that different SR architectures present trade-offs between standard quantitative metrics and perceptual image quality. We further assess their impact on a practical downstream task: field boundary detection from Sentinel-2 imagery. Our experiments demonstrate that SR pre-processing improves quantitative fidelity and downstream task performance, enabling low-resolution satellites to compete more effectively with commercial imagery.</p>
</abstract>
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