# Semantically Accurate Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Fast and Accurate Image Super-Resolution with Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01992/) (2017)
- [A Deep Journey into Super-resolution: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07523/) (2019)
- [The Effects of Super-Resolution on Object Detection Performance in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04098/) (2018)
- [Frustum VoxNet for 3D object detection from RGB-D or Depth images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05483/) (2019)
- [Super-Resolution for Overhead Imagery Using DenseNets and Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10312/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Zooming Out on Zooming In: Advancing Super-Resolution for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18082/) (2023)
- [Task-driven single-image super-resolution reconstruction of document scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08993/) (2024)
- [Privacy-Preserving Semantic Segmentation from Ultra-Low-Resolution RGB Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16034/) (2025)
- [Toward task-driven satellite image super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15474/) (2025)
- [Task-driven real-world super-resolution of document scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06953/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work addresses the problems of semantic segmentation and image super-resolution by jointly considering the performance of both in training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We propose a novel architecture and domain-specific feature loss, allowing super-resolution to operate as a pre-processing step to increase the performance of downstream computer vision tasks, specifically semantic segmentation. We demonstrate this approach using Nearmap's aerial imagery dataset which covers hundreds of urban areas at 5-7 cm per pixel resolution. We show the proposed approach improves perceived image quality as well as quantitative segmentation accuracy across all prediction classes, yielding an average accuracy improvement of 11.8% and 108% at 4x and 32x super-resolution, compared with state-of-the art single-network methods. This work demonstrates that jointly considering image-based and task-specific losses can improve the performance of both, and advances the state-of-the-art in semantic-aware super-resolution of aerial imagery.