A Guided Upsampling Network for Short Wave Infrared Images Using Graph Regularization

Exploiting the infrared area of the spectrum for classification problems is getting increasingly popular, because many materials have characteristic absorption bands in this area. However, sensors in the short wave infrared (SWIR) area and even higher wavelengths have a very low spatial resolution in comparison to classical cameras that operate in the visible wavelength area. Thus, in this paper an upsampling method for SWIR images guided by a visible image is presented. For that, the proposed guided upsampling network (GUNet) uses a graph-regularized optimization problem based on learned affinities is presented. The evaluation is based on a novel synthetic near-field visible-SWIR stereo database. Different guided upsampling methods are evaluated, which shows an improvement of nearly 1 dB on this database for the proposed upsampling method in comparison to the second best guided upsampling network. Furthermore, a visual example of an upsampled SWIR image of a real-world scene is depicted for showing real-world applicability.