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11, NOVEMBER 2018
A Progressively Enhanced Network for Video
Satellite Imagery Superresolution
Kui Jiang , Zhongyuan Wang , Member, IEEE, Peng Yi , and Junjun Jiang , Member, IEEE
Abstract—Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have
been extensively applied to image or video processing and analysis
tasks. For single-image superresolution (SR) processing, previous
CNN-based methods have led to significant improvements, when
compared to the shallow learning-based methods. However, these
CNN-based algorithms with simply direct or skip connections are
not suitable for satellite imagery SR because of complex imaging
conditions and unknown degradation process. More importantly,
they ignore the extraction and utilization of the structural informa-
tion in satellite images, which is very unfavorable for video satellite
imagery SR with such characteristics as small ground targets, weak
textures, and over-compression distortion. To this end, this letter
proposes a novel progressively enhanced network for satellite im-
age SR called PECNN, which is composed of a pretraining CNN-
based network and an enhanced dense connection network. The
pretraining part is used to extract the low-level feature maps and
reconstructs a basic high-resolution image from the low-resolution
input. In particular, we propose a transition unit to obtain the
structural information from the base output. Then, the obtained
structural information and the extracted low-level feature maps
are transmitted to the enhanced network for further extraction to
enforce the feature expression. Finally, a residual image with en-
hanced fine details obtained from the dense connection network
is used to enrich the basic image for the ultimate SR output. Ex-
periments on real-world Jilin-1 video satellite images and Kaggle
Open Source Dataset show that the proposed PECNN outperforms
the state-of-the-art methods both in visual effects and quantitative
metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/kuihua/PECNN.
Index Terms—Dense connection, residual network, superresolu-
tion, subpixel convolution, video satellite imagery.
I. INTRODUCTION
HE task of recovering a high-resolution (HR) image or
T video from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart is referred
to as superresolution (SR) [1], [2]. Recently, SR has been
evolved to deal with image resolution enhancement in vari-
Manuscript received July 11, 2018; revised August 12, 2018; accepted
September 6, 2018. Date of publication September 17, 2018; date of cur-
rent version September 21, 2018. This work was supported in part by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61671332, under
Grant U1736206, under Grant 61501413, under Grant 41771452, and under
Grant 41771454 and in part by the Hubei Province Technological Innovation
Major Project (2017AAA123). The associate editor coordinating the review of
this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Joao Paulo Papa.
(Corresponding author: Zhongyuan Wang.)
K. Jiang, Z. Wang, and P. Yi are with the School of Computer Science,
Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China (e-mail:, kuijiang@whu.edu.cn;
wzy_hope@163.com; yipeng@whu.edu.cn).
J. Jiang is with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin
Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China (e-mail:, jiangjunjun@hit.
edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2018.2870536
1070-9908 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO.
ous applications, such as medical imaging [3], satellite imaging
[4], [5], face recognition [6], [7], and video surveillance [8].
Remote sensing imagery finds the direct application of SR due
to the requirement for high spatial observation precision. Video
satellite is a new type of remote sensing satellite, which can cap-
ture continuous dynamic video rather than still imagery. Video
satellites are thus particularly well suited for the observation of
large dynamic targets, such as ships and aircrafts. Compared to
traditional remote sensing satellites, video satellites improve the
temporal resolution at the cost of spatial resolution, which thus
calls for spatial enhancement through image SR [9]–[11].
Reconstructing an SR image from its LR image is a highly ill-
posed problem because of the lost high-frequency information
suffering from various factors, such as subsampling, compres-
sion, and insufficient imaging resolution. In past years, various
SR algorithms [12]–[15] based on shallow learning approaches
have been proposed. The shallow-learning-based methods as-
sume a shared manifold consistency between LR images and
the corresponding HR counterparts [16], thereby learning the
linear mapping from LR to HR. However, since this assumption
does not always hold due to noise or large magnification (e.g.,
×4), they cannot be applied to practical applications involving
more complex mapping relationships.
Recently, the emergence of deep neural networks greatly im-
proves the performance with the multihidden-layer structure in
single-image SR (SISR) [17]–[19]. Dong et al. pioneers a CNN-
based SR method [2], which learns a mapping relationship from
LR to HR with an end-to-end model. Afterwards, various CNN
variants have been developed for SISR. Chen et al. proposes
to use multistage trainable nonlinear reaction diffusion as an
alternative to CNN where the weights and the nonlinearity are
trainable [20]. Wang et al. trains an end to end cascaded sparse
coding network inspired by learning iterative shrinkage and
thresholding algorithm [21] to fully exploit the natural sparsity
of images [22].
Furthermore, the residual learning is introduced into the com-
puter vision by the work of [23], used for constructing a deeper
CNN. He et al. [23] explicitly reformulate the functions into
learning residual with respect to the input, instead of learning
unreferenced functions. Then, Kim et al. proposes a residual net-
work named VDSR [24] for image SR by using adaptively gra-
dient clipping and skip connection to alleviate training difficulty.
Although these previously mentioned CNN-based frame-
works or residual networks have led to significant improve-
ments in general image SR, the simple topological structures
restrict fine feature expression. In particular, satellite image has
complex imaging conditions and unknown degradation process,
thus calling for high requirements for the feature extraction. In
addition, these traditional CNN-based algorithms ignore struc-
tural information, whereas it is quite crucial for satellite image
JIANG et al.: PROGRESSIVELY ENHANCED NETWORK FOR VIDEO SATELLITE IMAGERY SUPERRESOLUTION
Fig. 1. Outline of the proposed progressively enhanced network (PECNN). The components in the red box refer to the pretrained part and the components in the
green one denote the dense connection subnetwork.
processing and analysis tasks because of the small ground ob-
jects, weak textures, and heavy compression distortion in satel-
lite imagery.
In this letter, we propose a progressively enhanced network
for satellite image SR, namely PECNN, which is composed of
a pretrained network and a dense connection network. In the
front part of PECNN, low-level features are extracted from LR
input by a simple three-layer CNN network, followed by an ef-
ficient subpixel convolution layer [25] to obtain an upsampled
base image. Then, we obtain a set of structure-similar images
by pixel offset and extract structural information by projecting
these images onto LR space with a transition unit. Furthermore,
we concatenate and fuse the components (the structural infor-
mation and the low-level features) to pass to the dense connec-
tion network for a further extraction. In particular, an effective
dense connectivity pattern between every two residual blocks is
proposed to promote information propagation, which performs
direct connections from current block to any subsequent blocks,
enforcing the feature expression. At the final layer, the feature
maps extracted layer-by-layer are transmitted to the HR space
by a subpixel layer. In addition, for the training manner, we first
optimize the pretrained network by setting the loss equivalent
to the difference between the base image and ground truth. The
parameters in the dense connection network are then updated
with the pretraining module fixed, till convergence.
In summary, the main contributions are highlighted as
follows.
1) We propose a novel progressively enhanced network
(PECNN) for video satellite image SR reconstruction in a
convenient and effective end-to-end training manner.
2) Two effective and practical feature processing subnet-
works (the pretrained network and the dense connection
network) are simultaneously proposed to promote feature
extraction, enforcing feature expression. Especially, we
conduct a transition unit to obtain the sequential structure
related information to enforce feature expression.
II. PROPOSED METHOD
As shown in Fig. 1, the proposed PECNN can be roughly par-
titioned into two substructures: a pretraining CNN-based net-
work and a dense connection network. Residuals represent the
high-frequency components of an image, and specific learning
for high-frequency residuals is thus beneficial to detail construc-
tion. Therefore, the former learns a preliminarily magnified HR
image (so-called base image), and the latter learns the residual
image between the supervised (in training) or target (in testing)
HR image and the base image. Except the upsampling opera-
tion, motivated by prior work on SISR [24], [26]–[28], the entire
process of local feature extraction and fusion is performed in
LR space. In this letter, ILR and ISR are, respectively, seen as the
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1631
input and output of the proposed PECNN. We refer to r as the
up-scaling ratio. Both ILR and IHR have C color channels, which
are represented as real-valued tensors of size W × H × C and
W r × Hr × C, respectively.
A. Pretrained Network
We use the front part of PECNN to obtain a basic SR result
IBR ∈ Rr H ×r W from the given LR image ILR ∈ RH ×W . To
achieve the amplification operation without traditional interpo-
lation, we learn C × r2 feature maps for up-scaling base image
by the subpixel convolution [25] at the final layer, which can
convert the feature maps in the size of W × H × Cr2 into an
RGB image in the size of W r × Hr × C. Because of the com-
plex patterns of different feature maps in the final filters, we can
acquire a more comprehensive expression. This operation can
be described as follows:
IBR = P S(fn (ILR )) = P S(Wn × fn −1 (ILR ) + bn ) (1)
where fn −1 (ILR ) denotes output of the (n − 1)th layer, and Wn
and bn represent weight and bias of the nth layer, respectively.
f (·) refers to the convolution operation, followed by the rec-
tified linear unit for activation. P S(·) represents a periodic
shuffling operator (SP-conv) [25] that can rearrange the ele-
ments of an H × W × C · r2 tensor into a renewed tensor of
rH × rW × C. To obtain the base image by the factor of r, we
mathematically optimize the loss function as follows:

θ̂(IBR , θ1 ) = arg min ||IHR − f (ILR , θ1 )||22 (2)
θ1
where IHR refers to the ground truth image, f (ILR , θ1 ) denotes
the base output of the pretrained network, and θ1 represents
the model parameters. Particularly, the model parameters will
be fixed and preserved when the pretrained network have been
optimized.
B. Dense Connection Network
Residual learning is a new fashion different from the tradi-
tional learning methods, whose learned content is an extremely
sparse residual image through a deeper network. VDSR [24] is
a typical residual network architecture to deal with the SR prob-
lem. VDSR network requires Bicubic interpolated image as the
input, thus consuming huge computation and memory overhead.
In addition, VDSR utilizes a single-path feed-forward architec-
ture, where one state is mainly influenced by its direct former
state. As the depth increases, it encounters the problem that
weakens the impact on the front layers. We thereby conduct a
transition unit and a dense-connection-based network for feature
extraction and expression, as shown in Fig. 2.
As shown in Fig. 2 (top panel), the transition unit is composed
of such operations as pixel offset, projection, and concatenation.
1632
Fig. 2. Outlines of the proposed transition unit and ResNet. “C” and “+” denote the concatenation and adding operation, respectively.
TABLE I
COMPARISON OF THE NETWORK PA RAMETERS
A group of structure-similar images are obtained from the base
image by the pixel offset. Then, we convert them from HR space
to LR space to generate the structure-related information by a
projection, including applying the Gaussian filter to each basic
image to obtain the structure information and downsampling the
base images using Bicubic kernel with down-sampling factor r.
Finally, the low-level features from the pretrained network and
the structure-related information from the transition unit are
fused for a further extraction in residual blocks.
Second, Fig 2 (middle panel) shows the main components in
the dense connection network. Contrary to conventional skip-
connection-based networks, we adopt a more helpful dense
connection fashion between the every two blocks to enhance
information propagation, which benefits to the fine feature
expression.
Finally, Fig 2 (bottom panel) represents a residual block, using
three convolution layers to extract local features. To reduce the
parameters and fuse the information, a 1 × 1 convolution layer
is embedded in the ending. The comparison results of model
complexity are reported in Table I. It is seen that our model
enjoys the least parameters (only about 1/3 of VDSR), thus
extremely releasing the computation and memory burden.
C. Model Optimization
Image SR is an ill-posed problem in nature, whose solution
is not unique. In training, the loss function has an important in-
fluence on the convergence speed and approximation accuracy
of the network model. The commonly used loss functions in-
clude pixel-based l1 -norm [26] and l2 -norm [2], [24], [29], and
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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2018
feature-based cosine distance. They usually directly approxi-
mate the learned images to the target results.
As presented before, since our network follows a residual
learning structure, we will explicitly optimize the residual im-
ages rather than the target images. We progressively approach
the target by learning two images with different feature levels.
Specifically, we obtain a base SR image IBR from the pretrained
network by minimizing the divergence between IBR and IHR .
And then, the dense connection part is used to obtain a residual
image IRES by optimizing the discrepancy between IBR and IBR ˆ .
The details are shown as follows:
IBR
ˆ = IHR − IRES (3)
where IBRˆ refers to the divergence between the ground truth IHR
and the prediction IRES of the dense connection network. We
acquire the suitable IRES by optimizing the following function:

θ∗ (IRES , θ2 ) = arg min IBR
θ2
− (IHR − f (g(IBR ), fn (ILR ), θ2 ))22 (4)
where g(·) represents an operation to obtain the structural infor-
mation by a pixel offset and a downscaling operation. fn (ILR )
denotes the feature maps extracted from ILR by the pretrained
network. f (g(IBR ), fn (ILR ), θ2 ) refers to the output of the dense
connection network, and θ2 denotes the model parameters in the
dense connection network.
III. EXPERIMENTS AND DISCUSSIONS
In this section, we conduct a group of experiments on video
satellite images to validate PECNN. The comparison results
with Bicubic, SRCNN [2], and VDSR [24] will be reported
in the following. In addition, because the test images have no
reference objects (i.e., using the observed LR images instead
of the downscaled LR images as input), we provide the visual
results and introduce the indicators of average gradient (AG)
[31] and naturalness image quality evaluator (NIQE) [32] to
evaluate the reconstruction quality further. These metrics can
reasonably assess image clarity since they sensitively reflect
JIANG et al.: PROGRESSIVELY ENHANCED NETWORK FOR VIDEO SATELLITE IMAGERY SUPERRESOLUTION 1633

TABLE II
COMPARISON RESULTS OF THE RUNNING TIME ON Kaggle Open Source Dataset WITH SCALE FACTOR OF 3

Fig. 3. Comparison results on Jilin-1 satellite imagery with scaling factor × 3. The bold indicates the best performance (AG/NIQE).

content sharpness, detail contrast, and texture diversity when TABLE III
ground truth image is not available. In particular, the larger AG COMPARISON RESULTS OF THE AG AND NIQE ON Jilin-1 VIDEO SATELLITE
IMAGERY WITH SCALE OF 3
and the smaller NIQE, the clearer the image.

A. Dataset and Parameters

Because the real-world video satellite images are in low qual-
ity and lose details suffering from over-compression, they are
not suitable for training. We thus have to seek for suitable clear
images served as training samples. DIV2K dataset [33] is a
newly produced high-quality general image dataset for image
restoration tasks, which contains 900 HR images. We randomly
select 291 images used as our training dataset. In addition, The
test datasets are composed of images by Chinese Jilin-1 video
satellite imagery and emphKaggle Open Source Dataset. For
training, the input patches are cropped into size of 32 × 32 pix-
els, with batch size of 32. Learning rate is initialized as 10−3
and 10−4 for the pretrained network and the dense connec-
tion network, respectively. We implement the proposed network
with Tensorflow framework on the NVIDA Titan XP GPU plat-
form. In experiments, the entire training process takes about 50
epochs in 5 h (15 and 35 for the pretrained and dense network,
respectively).
B. Comparison Results
We conduct the comparison experiments on Jilin-1 video
satellite imagery and emphKaggle Open Source Dataset (cov-
ering agriculture, airport, buildings, warships, forest, freeway,
parking lot, storage tanks, and harbor) with VDSR [24], SRCNN
[2], and Bicubic interpolation. As given in Table III, PECNN
exhibits the highest AG and the least NIQE. In addition, we
evaluate the time complexity on 30 test images, which is one
of the most crucial metrics for the practical application. The
comparison results are reported in Table II.
As shown in Fig. 3, most of compared methods [2], [24]
produce noticeable artifacts and blurred outlines, whereas the
proposed PECNN yields more realistic results with fewer jagged
lines and ringing artifacts. Overall, our method outperforms
VDSR, SRCNN, and Bicubic in recovering the high-frequency
details of satellite images.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, we propose a novel progressively enhanced
network, namely PECNN, for superresolving video satellite
imagery. It is composed of a pretrained network and a dense
connection network. In particular, an effective transition unit is
embedded in the middle of the network to catch the profile struc-
ture related information. We also promote the feature expression
by adopting more effective dense connections and progressive
feature learning fashion. Since the constructed network takes
less depths and filters but more dense connections among lay-
ers, it enjoys pronounced SR performance within acceptable
computational complexity and is therefore applicable for huge-
size satellite imagery. The experimental results on Jilin-1 video
satellite imagery and Kaggle Open Source Dataset show its
superiority over VDSR, SRCNN, and Bicubic.

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1634
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