Fusing Multi-Temporal Context for Image Super-Resolution Reconstruction in Cultural Heritage Monitoring

Effective conservation of World Heritage Sites relies on high-precision and continuous dynamic monitoring of their status. However, cloud cover, limitations in sensor resolution, and the vast distribution of heritage areas make it challenging to consistently acquire high-resolution imagery for key years, thereby hindering accurate characterization of their temporal evolution. To overcome this bottleneck, this paper proposes a temporal change-aware super-resolution reconstruction model. This model innovatively utilizes the temporal evolution information of heritage landscapes as a key clue for reconstructing high-quality imagery of the target year. We design a multi-branch architecture that takes the low-resolution image of the target year as the core input, while also incorporating the high- and low-resolution images from its preceding (t - 1) and subsequent (t + 1) years. Through parallel encoding branches, the model separately learns to: (1) extract spatial features from the multi-temporal low-resolution images, and (2) explicitly model the change patterns recorded in the high-resolution imagery from year t - 1 to t + 1, via a dedicated temporal change encoder. Finally, by deeply fusing these features, the model generates a simulated high-resolution image for the target year (t). Experimental results on a real-world dataset of the Weiyang Palace (WYP) core area (2017-2019), with 2018 as the target year, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance, significantly outperforming traditional single-image super-resolution models and a contrastive model without explicit temporal change modeling.