Bidirectional Convolutional LSTM Neural Network for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

Single-image super-resolution (SR) is an effective approach to enhance spatial resolution for numerous applications such as object detection and classification when the resolution of sensors is limited. Although deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) proposed for this purpose in recent years have outperformed relatively shallow models, enormous parameters bring the risk of overfitting. In addition, due to the different scale of objects in images, the hierarchical features of deep CNN contain additional information for SR tasks, while most CNN models have not fully utilized these features. In this paper, we proposed a deep yet concise network to address these problems. Our network consists of two main structures: (1) recursive inference block based on dense connection reuse of local low-level features, and recursive learning is applied to control the model parameters while increasing the receptive fields; (2) a bidirectional convolutional LSTM (BiConvLSTM) layer is introduced to learn the correlations of features from each recursion and adaptively select the complementary information for the reconstruction layer. Experiments on multispectral satellite images, panchromatic satellite images, and nature high-resolution remote-sensing images showed that our proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art methods while utilizing fewer parameters, and ablation studies demonstrated the effectiveness of a BiConvLSTM layer for an image SR task.