# Spiking Meets Attention: Efficient Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution with Attention Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04223/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [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)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06068/) (2019)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [Single Image Super-Resolution via a Holistic Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08767/) (2020)
- [Fast, Accurate, and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Cascading Residual Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08664/) (2018)
- [Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11856/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Spiking-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06530/) (2019)
- [SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16620/) (2023)
- [Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11084/) (2021)
- [Interpreting Super-Resolution Networks with Local Attribution Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11036/) (2020)
- [Dual Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03364/) (2023)
- [Residual Feature Distillation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11551/) (2020)
- [Attention Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13929/) (2022)
- [Temporal-wise Attention Spiking Neural Networks for Event Streams Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11711/) (2021)
- [Spike-driven Transformer V2: Meta Spiking Neural Network Architecture Inspiring the Design of Next-generation Neuromorphic Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03663/) (2024)
- [Spike-FlowNet: Event-based Optical Flow Estimation with Energy-Efficient Hybrid Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06696/) (2020)
- [MambaIRv2: Attentive State Space Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15269/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Coloring the Noise: Adversarial Sobolev Alignment for Faithful Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23264/) (2026)
- [Event-Based Vision in Space: Applications, Trends, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01280/) (2026)
- [Current Injection Spiking Neural Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19879/) (2026)
- [RetiWave-Mamba: A Dual-Stream Network for Retinal Disease Detection based on Multi-scale Context and Frequency-Adaptive Mamba Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17623/) (2026)
- [DPAMixerSR: An Efficient Degradation-Pattern-Aware Model for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32705/) (2026)
- [Learning to Select Features with Manifold Deep Unfolding PCA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19436/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are emerging as a promising alternative to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), offering biological plausibility and energy efficiency. Despite these merits, SNNs are frequently hampered by limited capacity and insufficient representation power, yet remain underexplored in remote sensing super-resolution (SR) tasks. In this paper, we first observe that spiking signals exhibit drastic intensity variations across diverse textures, highlighting an active learning state of the neurons. This observation motivates us to apply SNNs for efficient SR of RSIs. Inspired by the success of attention mechanisms in representing salient information, we devise the spiking attention block (SAB), a concise yet effective component that optimizes membrane potentials through inferred attention weights, which, in turn, regulates spiking activity for superior feature representation. Our key contributions include: 1) we bridge the independent modulation between temporal and channel dimensions, facilitating joint feature correlation learning, and 2) we access the global self-similar patterns in large-scale remote sensing imagery to infer spatial attention weights, incorporating effective priors for realistic and faithful reconstruction. Building upon SAB, we proposed SpikeSR, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across various remote sensing benchmarks such as AID, DOTA, and DIOR, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Code of SpikeSR will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/SpikeSR.