Spectral-Consistency-Aware Evaluation of Deep Super-Resolution Methods for UAV Five-Band Multispectral Crop Imagery

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multispectral imaging enables flexible, non-destructive crop monitoring. Although UAV imagery offers much higher spatial resolution than satellite platforms, its effective spatial detail at typical operational flight altitudes can still be insufficient for plant-level interpretation and fine canopy structure, which can reduce vegetation-index reliability. Most super-resolution (SR) research targets RGB or satellite imagery and emphasizes perceptual or pixel-wise quality, leaving the spectral fidelity of reconstructed UAV multispectral imagery under-examined. This study benchmarked an SR evaluation framework for UAV-based five-band crop imagery (Blue, Green, Red, Red-edge, and near-infrared) using the open-source AI Hub cabbage dataset, with low-resolution inputs generated by controlled downsampling at ×2, ×3, and ×4. Nine methods (bicubic, SRCNN, EDSR, RCAN, SwinIR-based, ESRGAN-based, HAT-based, DAT-based, and DRCT-based SR) were compared under joint five-channel and band-wise reconstruction on 2170 test scenes using image-quality, spectral-angle, vegetation-index (NDVI, GNDVI, NDRE), band-wise, and efficiency metrics. EDSR and RCAN gave the most balanced performance. At ×4, band-wise reconstruction was strongest for per-band spatial fidelity, where EDSR reduced RMSE by 12.6%, and RCAN lowered near-infrared RMSE by about 21% relative to bicubic, whereas joint reconstruction with its spectral-angle and vegetation-index losses best preserved spectral relationships (spectral angle and vegetation-index errors). Learning-based gains were clearest at ×4. The recently proposed HAT-based, DAT-based, and DRCT-based attention models achieved the strongest pixel-wise RMSE and PSNR but did not surpass EDSR or RCAN on spectral angle or vegetation-index preservation under the equalized training budget. These results indicate that UAV multispectral SR should be assessed by spatial fidelity together with spectral consistency and agricultural index reliability.