Semantically accurate super-resolution Generative Adversarial Networks

This work addresses the problems of semantic segmentation and image super-resolution by jointly considering the performance of both in training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We propose a novel architecture and domain-specific feature loss, allowing super-resolution to operate as a pre-processing step to increase the performance of downstream computer vision tasks, specifically semantic segmentation. We demonstrate this approach using Nearmap’s aerial imagery dataset which covers hundreds of urban areas at 5–7 cm per pixel resolution. We show the proposed approach improves perceived image quality as well as quantitative segmentation accuracy across all prediction classes, yielding an average accuracy improvement of 11.8% and 108% at 4× and 32× super-resolution, compared with state-of-the art single-network methods. This work demonstrates that jointly considering image-based and task-specific losses can improve the performance of both, and advances the state-of-the-art in semantic-aware super-resolution of aerial imagery.