Panchromatic Image Super-Resolution Via Self Attention-Augmented Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network

Panchromatic (PAN) images contain abundant spatial information that is useful for earth observation, but always suffer from low-resolution ( LR) due to the sensor limitation and large-scale view field. The current super-resolution (SR) methods based on traditional attention mechanism have shown remarkable advantages but remain imperfect to reconstruct the edge details of SR images. To address this problem, an improved SR model which involves the self-attention augmented Wasserstein generative adversarial network ( SAA-WGAN) is designed to dig out the reference information among multiple features for detail enhancement. We use an encoder-decoder network followed by a fully convolutional network (FCN) as the backbone to extract multi-scale features and reconstruct the High-resolution (HR) results. To exploit the relevance between multi-layer feature maps, we first integrate a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) into each skip-connection of the encoder-decoder subnet, generating weighted maps to enhance both channel-wise and spatial-wise feature representation automatically. Besides, considering that the HR results and LR inputs are highly similar in structure, yet cannot be fully reflected in traditional attention mechanism, we, therefore, designed a self augmented attention (SAA) module, where the attention weights are produced dynamically via a similarity function between hidden features; this design allows the network to flexibly adjust the fraction relevance among multi-layer features and keep the long-range inter information, which is helpful to preserve details. In addition, the pixel-wise loss is combined with perceptual and gradient loss to achieve comprehensive supervision. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other SR methods in terms of both objective evaluation and visual effect.