# Beyond Pretty Pictures: Combined Single- and Multi-Image Super-resolution for Sentinel-2 Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24799/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15660/) (2022)
- [Swin2SR: SwinV2 Transformer for Compressed Image Super-Resolution and Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11345/) (2022)
- [Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A Brief Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02368/) (2021)
- [Lightweight Temporal Self-Attention for Classifying Satellite Image Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00586/) (2020)
- [Continental-Scale Building Detection from High Resolution Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12283/) (2021)
- [Super-resolution of Sentinel-2 images: Learning a globally applicable deep neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04271/) (2018)
- [HighRes-net: Recursive Fusion for Multi-Frame Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06460/) (2020)
- [Open High-Resolution Satellite Imagery: The WorldStrat Dataset -- With Application to Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06418/) (2022)
- [Multi-Spectral Multi-Image Super-Resolution of Sentinel-2 with Radiometric Consistency Losses and Its Effect on Building Delineation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03231/) (2021)
- [Learned Multi-View Texture Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04775/) (2020)
- [Swin2-MoSE: A New Single Image Super-Resolution Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18924/) (2024)
- [Cross-sensor super-resolution of irregularly sampled Sentinel-2 time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16409/) (2024)
- [L1BSR: Exploiting Detector Overlap for Self-Supervised Single-Image Super-Resolution of Sentinel-2 L1B Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06871/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Super-resolution aims to increase the resolution of satellite images by reconstructing high-frequency details, which go beyond na"ive upsampling. This has particular relevance for Earth observation missions like Sentinel-2, which offer frequent, regular coverage at no cost; but at coarse resolution. Its pixel footprint is too large to capture small features like houses, streets, or hedge rows. To address this, we present SEN4X, a hybrid super-resolution architecture that combines the advantages of single-image and multi-image techniques. It combines temporal oversampling from repeated Sentinel-2 acquisitions with a learned prior from high-resolution Pl'eiades Neo data. In doing so, SEN4X upgrades Sentinel-2 imagery to 2.5 m ground sampling distance. We test the super-resolved images on urban land-cover classification in Hanoi, Vietnam. We find that they lead to a significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art super-resolution baselines.