2019/07/08 by Evan Koester, Koester, Evan, Cem Şahin +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image Fusion Techniques #Advanced Image Processing Techniques #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1907.05283
openalex publication_date 2019/07/08 · openalex created_date 2019/07/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As Super-Resolution (SR) has matured as a research topic, it has been applied to additional topics beyond image reconstruction. In particular, combining classification or object detection tasks with a super-resolution preprocessing stage has yielded improvements in accuracy especially with objects that are small relative to the scene. While SR has shown promise, a study comparing SR and naive upscaling methods such as Nearest Neighbors (NN) interpolation when applied as a preprocessing step for object detection has not been performed. We apply the topic to satellite data and compare the Multi-scale Deep Super-Resolution (MDSR) system to NN on the xView challenge dataset. To do so, we propose a pipeline for processing satellite data that combines multi-stage image tiling and upscaling, the YOLOv2 object detection architecture, and label stitching. We compare the effects of training models using an upscaling factor of 4, upscaling images from 30cm Ground Sample Distance (GSD) to an effective GSD of 7.5cm. Upscaling by this factor significantly improves detection results, increasing Average Precision (AP) of a generalized vehicle class by 23 percent. We demonstrate that while SR produces upscaled images that are more visually pleasing than their NN counterparts, object detection networks see little difference in accuracy with images upsampled using NN obtaining nearly identical results to the MDSRx4 enhanced images with a difference of 0.0002 AP between the two methods.