The Use of a Stable Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SSRGAN) on Remote Sensing Images

Because of the complicated imaging conditions in space and the finite imaging systems on satellites, the resolution of remote sensing images is limited. The process of increasing an image’s resolution, image super-resolution, aims to obtain a clearer image. High-resolution (HR) images are affected by various input conditions, such as motion, imaging blur, down-sampling matrix, and various types of noise. Changes in these conditions seriously affect low-resolution (LR) images, so if the imaging process is a pathological problem, super-resolution reconstruction is a pathological anti-problem. To optimize the imaging quality of satellites without changing the optical system, we chose to reconstruct images acquired by satellites using deep learning. We changed the original super-resolution generative adversarial nets network, upgraded the generator’s network part to ResNet-50, and inserted an additional fully connected (FC) layer in the network of the discriminator part. We also modified the loss function by changing the weight of regularization loss from 2 × 10−8 to 2 × 10−9, aiming to preserve more detail. In addition, we carefully and specifically chose remote sensing images taken under low-light circumstances from GF-5 satellites to form a new dataset for training and validation. The test results proved that our method can obtain good results. The reconstruction peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) at the scaling factors of 2, 3, and 4 reached 32.6847, 31.8191, and 30.5095 dB, respectively, and the corresponding structural similarity (SSIM) reached 0.8962, 0.8434, and 0.8124. The super-resolution speed was also satisfactory, making real-time reconstruction more probable.