Progressive Structure Preservation and Detail Refinement for Remote Sensing Single-Image Super-Resolution

Recent advances in deep-learning-based remote sensing image super-resolution (RSISR) have garnered significant attention. Conventional models typically perform upsampling at the end of the architecture, which reduces computational effort but leads to information loss and limits image quality. Moreover, the structural complexity and texture diversity of remote sensing images pose challenges in detail preservation. While transformer-based approaches improve global feature capture, they often introduce redundancy and overlook local details. To address these issues, we propose a novel progressive structure preservation and detail refinement super-resolution (PSPDR-SR) model, designed to enhance both structural integrity and fine details in RSISR. The model comprises two primary subnetworks: the structure-aware super-resolution (SaSR) subnetwork and the detail recovery and refinement (DR&R) subnetwork. To efficiently leverage multilayer and multiscale feature representations, we introduce coarse-to-fine dynamic information transmission (C2FDIT) and fine-to-coarse dynamic information transmission (F2CDIT) modules, which facilitate the extraction of richer details from low-resolution (LR) remote sensing images. These modules integrate transformers and convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) blocks to form dynamic information transmission modules (DITMs), enabling effective bidirectional feature transmission both horizontally and vertically. This method ensures comprehensive feature fusion, mitigates redundant information, and preserves essential extracted features within the deep network. Experimental results demonstrate that PSPDR-SR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on two benchmark datasets in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, excelling in structure preservation and detail enhancement across various metrics, including SSIM, MS_SSIM, learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), deep image structure and texture similarity (DISTS), spatial correlation coefficient (SCC), and spectral angle mapper (SAM).