Super-Resolution-Assisted Farmland Boundary Extraction from Medium-Resolution Satellite Image: A Real-ESRGAN and YOLO...

This study addresses the issue of insufficient spatial resolution in remote sensing images for farmland boundary identification in precision agriculture. It proposes a framework that combines Real-ESRGAN, a GAN-based blind super-resolution algorithm, with YOLO, a real-time instance segmentation framework, to improve farmland boundary extraction accuracy from medium-resolution satellite imagery. Using GF-2 imagery of the agricultural area of Nanxiong City, Guangdong Province, a manually annotated farmland boundary dataset was constructed. The experiments were conducted in this single study area (Nanxiong City); the generalization of the proposed framework to other regions, crops, and sensor platforms requires further validation. The super-resolution preprocessing restored a 1 m resolution from 4 m input while enhancing boundary-related high-frequency details and mitigating aliasing-induced field merging. In farmland boundary recognition, the super-resolved 1 m images achieved mAP@0.5 of 0.755 and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.628, approaching the resampled 1 m reference (0.823 and 0.733) and clearly outperforming the resampled 4 m baseline (zero accuracy). The reported mAP values are validation-set best-checkpoint figures and therefore represent an optimistic upper bound under the current spatially autocorrelated split. The framework provides a cost-effective solution for large-scale farmland boundary extraction and precision agricultural management.