Cross-sensor super-resolution of irregularly sampled Sentinel-2 time series

Aimi Okabayashi, Nicolas Audebert, Simon Donike, Charlotte Pelletier; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 502-511

Satellite imaging generally presents a trade-off between the frequency of acquisitions and the spatial resolution of the images. Super-resolution is often advanced as a way to get the best of both worlds. In this work we investigate multi-image super-resolution of satellite image time series i.e. how multiple images of the same area acquired at different dates can help reconstruct a higher resolution observation. In particular we extend state-of-the-art deep single and multi-image super-resolution algorithms such as SRDiff and HighRes-net to deal with irregularly sampled Sentinel-2 time series. We introduce BreizhSR a new dataset for 4x super-resolution of Sentinel-2 time series using very high-resolution SPOT-6 imagery of Brittany a French region. We show that using multiple images significantly improves super-resolution performance and that a well-designed temporal positional encoding allows us to perform super-resolution for different times of the series. In addition we observe a trade-off between spectral fidelity and perceptual quality of the reconstructed HR images questioning future directions for super-resolution of Earth Observation data. The source code is available at https://github.com/aimiokab/MISR-S2.