Super-Resolution of Remote Sensing Images Based on Transferred Generative Adversarial Network

Single image super-resolution (SR) has been widely studied in recent years as a crucial technique for remote sensing applications. This paper proposes a SR method for remote sensing images based on a transferred generative adversarial network (TGAN). Different from the previous GAN-based SR approaches, the novelty of our method mainly reflects from two aspects. First, the batch normalization layers are removed to reduce the memory consumption and the computational burden, as well as raising the accuracy. Second, our model is trained in a transfer-learning fashion to cope with the insufficiency of training data, which is the crux of applying deep learning methods to remote sensing applications. The model is firstly trained on an external dataset DIV2K and further fine-tuned with the remote sensing dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to SRCNN and SRGAN in terms of both the objective evaluation and the subjective perspective.