# DSR: Towards Drone Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12327 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12327/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [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)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- ["Zero-Shot" Super-Resolution using Deep Internal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06087/) (2017)
- [Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06116/) (2017)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00416/) (2021)
- [Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05972/) (2017)
- [Zoom To Learn, Learn To Zoom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05169/) (2019)
- [Deep Burst Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10997/) (2021)
- [Burst Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03680/) (2021)
- [Blind Universal Bayesian Image Denoising with Gaussian Noise Level Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03029/) (2019)
- [Stochastic Frequency Masking to Improve Super-Resolution and Denoising Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07119/) (2020)
- [Lucas-Kanade Reloaded: End-to-End Super-Resolution from Raw Image Bursts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06191/) (2021)
- [Collapsible Linear Blocks for Super-Efficient Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09404/) (2021)
- [RepSR: Training Efficient VGG-style Super-Resolution Networks with Structural Re-Parameterization and Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05671/) (2022)
- [DAC-SDC Low Power Object Detection Challenge for UAV Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00110/) (2018)
- [Fidelity Estimation Improves Noisy-Image Classification With Pretrained Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00673/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite achieving remarkable progress in recent years, single-image super-resolution methods are developed with several limitations. Specifically, they are trained on fixed content domains with certain degradations (whether synthetic or real). The priors they learn are prone to overfitting the training configuration. Therefore, the generalization to novel domains such as drone top view data, and across altitudes, is currently unknown. Nonetheless, pairing drones with proper image super-resolution is of great value. It would enable drones to fly higher covering larger fields of view, while maintaining a high image quality. To answer these questions and pave the way towards drone image super-resolution, we explore this application with particular focus on the single-image case. We propose a novel drone image dataset, with scenes captured at low and high resolutions, and across a span of altitudes. Our results show that off-the-shelf state-of-the-art networks witness a significant drop in performance on this different domain. We additionally show that simple fine-tuning, and incorporating altitude awareness into the network's architecture, both improve the reconstruction performance.