Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model with Adversarial Learning for Remote Sensing Super-Resolution

Abstract

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) for image enhancement enables the generation of high spatial resolution in Remote Sensing (RS) images without incurring additional costs. This approach offers a practical solution to obtain high-resolution RS images, addressing challenges posed by the expense of acquisition equipment and unpredictable weather conditions. To address the over-smoothing of the previous SISR models, the diffusion model has been incorporated into RS SISR to generate Super-Resolution (SR) images with enhanced textural details. In this paper, we propose a Diffusion model with Adversarial Learning Strategy (DiffALS) to refine the generative capability of the diffusion model. DiffALS integrates an additional Noise Discriminator (ND) into the training process, employing an adversarial learning strategy on the data distribution learning. This ND guides noise prediction by considering the general correspondence between the noisy image in each step, thereby enhancing the diversity of generated data and the detailed texture prediction of the diffusion model. Furthermore, considering that the diffusion model may exhibit suboptimal performance on traditional pixel-level metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM), we showcase the effectiveness of DiffALS through downstream semantic segmentation applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves remarkable accuracy and notable visual enhancements. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our model establishes an improvement of 189 for Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and 0.002 for Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) in a SR dataset, namely Alsat, and achieves improvements of 0.4%, 0.3%, and 0.2% for F1 score, MIoU, and Accuracy, respectively, in a segmentation dataset, namely Vaihingen.