Learning super-resolution for Sentinel-2 images with real ground truth data from a reference satellite

Abstract

Copernicus program via its Sentinel missions is making earth observation more accessible and affordable for everybody. Sentinel-2 images provide multi-spectral information every 5 days for each location. However, the maximum spatial resolution of its bands is 10m for RGB and near-infrared bands. Increasing the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 images without additional costs, would make any posterior analysis more accurate. Most approaches on super-resolution for Sentinel-2 have focused on obtaining 10m resolution images for those at lower resolutions (20m and 60m), taking advantage of the information provided by bands of finer resolutions (10m). Otherwise, our focus is on increasing the resolution of the 10m bands, that is, super-resolving 10m bands to 2.5m resolution, where no additional information is available. This problem is known as single-image super-resolution and deep learning-based approaches have become the state-of-the-art for this problem on standard images. Obviously, models learned for standard images do not translate well to satellite images. Hence, the problem is how to train a deep learning model for super-resolving Sentinel-2 images when no ground truth exist (Sentinel-2 images at 2.5m). We propose a methodology for learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentinel-2 image super-resolution making use of images from other sensors having a high similarity with Sentinel-2 in terms of spectral bands, but greater spatial resolution. Our proposal is tested with a state-of-the-art neural network showing that it can be useful for learning to increase the spatial resolution of RGB and near-infrared bands of Sentinel-2.