# DroneSR: Rethinking Few-shot Thermal Image Super-Resolution from Drone-based Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 16 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [DeSRA: Detect and Delete the Artifacts of GAN-based Real-World Super-Resolution Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02457/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Degradation Estimation in Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07012/) (2024)
- [Infrared Image Super-Resolution via Heterogeneous Convolutional WGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00960/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Ivan-ISTD: Rethinking Cross-domain Heteroscedastic Noise Perturbations in Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12241/) (2025)
- [AngularFuse: A Closer Look at Angle-based Perception for Spatial-Sensitive Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12260/) (2025)
- [Cross-Scenario Deraining Adaptation with Unpaired Data: Superpixel Structural Priors and Multi-Stage Pseudo-Rain Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21661/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although large scale models achieve significant improvements in performance, the overfitting challenge still frequently undermines their generalization ability. In super resolution tasks on images, diffusion models as representatives of generative models typically adopt large scale architectures. However, few-shot drone-captured infrared training data frequently induces severe overfitting in large-scale architectures. To address this key challenge, our method proposes a new Gaussian quantization representation learning method oriented to diffusion models that alleviates overfitting and enhances robustness. At the same time, an effective monitoring mechanism tracks large scale architectures during training to detect signs of overfitting. By introducing Gaussian quantization representation learning, our method effectively reduces overfitting while maintaining architecture complexity. On this basis, we construct a multi source drone-based infrared image benchmark dataset for detection and use it to emphasize overfitting issues of large scale architectures in few sample, drone-based diverse drone-based image reconstruction scenarios. To verify the efficacy of the method in mitigating overfitting, experiments are conducted on the constructed benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing super resolution approaches and significantly mitigates overfitting of large scale architectures under complex conditions. The code and DroneSR dataset will be available at: https://github.com/wengzp1/GARLSR.