TWIST-GAN: Towards Wavelet Transform and Transferred GAN for Spatio-Temporal Single Image Super Resolution

TL;DR

TWIST-GAN introduces a frequency domain approach using wavelet transforms and transferred GANs to enhance single image super-resolution in remote sensing, effectively reducing artifacts and improving texture detail with lower computational costs.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wavelet transform-based GAN architecture for remote sensing SISR, incorporating transfer learning to improve high-frequency detail reconstruction and reduce GPU memory usage.

Findings

Achieved better texture and high-frequency detail reconstruction.

Reduced GPU memory usage by 43%.

Accelerated training by removing batch normalization layers.

Abstract

Single Image Super-resolution (SISR) produces high-resolution images with fine spatial resolutions from aremotely sensed image with low spatial resolution. Recently, deep learning and generative adversarial networks(GANs) have made breakthroughs for the challenging task of single image super-resolution (SISR). However, thegenerated image still suffers from undesirable artifacts such as, the absence of texture-feature representationand high-frequency information. We propose a frequency domain-based spatio-temporal remote sensingsingle image super-resolution technique to reconstruct the HR image combined with generative adversarialnetworks (GANs) on various frequency bands (TWIST-GAN). We have introduced a new method incorporatingWavelet Transform (WT) characteristics and transferred generative adversarial network. The LR image hasbeen split into various frequency bands by using the WT, whereas, the transfer generative adversarial networkpredicts high-frequency components via a proposed architecture. Finally, the inverse transfer of waveletsproduces a reconstructed image with super-resolution. The model is first trained on an external DIV2 Kdataset and validated with the UC Merceed Landsat remote sensing dataset and Set14 with each image sizeof 256x256. Following that, transferred GANs are used to process spatio-temporal remote sensing images inorder to minimize computation cost differences and improve texture information. The findings are comparedqualitatively and qualitatively with the current state-of-art approaches. In addition, we saved about 43% of theGPU memory during training and accelerated the execution of our simplified version by eliminating batchnormalization layers.