Microwave Radiometer Data Superresolution Using Image Degradation and Residual Network

Microwave radiometers are the key sensors to globally monitor environmental parameters; however, it suffers from its low and nonuniform spatial resolution. In this paper, a superresolution (SR) technique based on image degradation and residual network is proposed to enhance the spatial resolution of microwave radiometer data. Specifically, an improved degradation model is proposed to construct pairs of high-resolution (HR) and low-resolution (LR) data for training and testing. In addition, a new residual network connected by the SR main and gradient auxiliary branches in parallel is designed to achieve SR reconstructions, where eight-channel gradient maps extracted from LR data are input into the auxiliary branch to help to reconstruct. SR results are eventually generated by the trained SR network. Experiments executed on both simulated and actual data demonstrate the soundness and the superiority of the proposed SR technique.