Single Image Super-Resolution for Domain-Specific Ultra-Low Bandwidth Image Transmission

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of single image super-resolution techniques to reconstruct high-quality images from extremely low-bandwidth transmitted images in underwater environments, demonstrating improved perceptual quality over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a neural network-based approach for super-resolution tailored to underwater acoustic communication constraints, using real-world maritime data for training and evaluation.

Findings

Achieves better perceptual quality than bicubic up-sampling.

Demonstrates feasibility of transmitting ultra-low resolution images and reconstructing high-quality images.

Shows potential for practical underwater imaging applications under bandwidth limitations.

Abstract

Low-bandwidth communication, such as underwater acoustic communication, is limited by best-case data rates of 30--50 kbit/s. This renders such channels unusable or inefficient at best for single image, video, or other bandwidth-demanding sensor-data transmission. To combat data-transmission bottlenecks, we consider practical use-cases within the maritime domain and investigate the prospect of Single Image Super-Resolution methodologies. This is investigated on a large, diverse dataset obtained during years of trawl fishing where cameras have been placed in the fishing nets. We propose down-sampling images to a low-resolution low-size version of about 1 kB that satisfies underwater acoustic bandwidth requirements for even several frames per second. A neural network is then trained to perform up-sampling, trying to reconstruct the original image. We aim to investigate the quality of reconstructed images and prospects for such methods in practical use-cases in general. Our focus in this work is solely on learning to reconstruct the high-resolution images on "real-world" data. We show that our method achieves better perceptual quality and superior reconstruction than generic bicubic up-sampling and motivates further work in this area for underwater applications.