With the fast growth in the visual surveillance and security sectors, thermal infrared images have become increasingly necessary ina large variety of industrial applications. This is true even though IR sensors are still more expensive than their RGB counterpart having the same resolution. In this paper, we propose a deep learning solution to enhance the thermal image resolution. The following results are given:(I) Introduction of a multimodal, visual-thermal fusion model that ad-dresses thermal image super-resolution, via integrating high-frequency information from the visual image. (II) Investigation of different net-work architecture schemes in the literature, their up-sampling methods,learning procedures, and their optimization functions by showing their beneficial contribution to the super-resolution problem. (III) A bench-mark ULB17-VT dataset that contains thermal images and their visual images counterpart is presented. (IV) Presentation of a qualitative evaluation of a large test set with 58 samples and 22 raters which shows that our proposed model performs better against state-of-the-arts.
The optimization procedure seeks to minimize the distance between the original HR image and the generated SR image. The most used optimization function in the SR problem is the content loss, which is done using the MSE as in @cite_1 or Charbonnier as in @cite_21 . SRGAN @cite_26 instead uses the adversarial loss and @cite_12 uses the perceptual similarity loss to enhance the reconstructed image resolution.
@cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_12 @cite_26
2951997238 2950689937 2523714292
We present a highly accurate single-image super-resolution (SR) method. Our method uses a very deep convolutional network inspired by VGG-net used for ImageNet classification simonyan2015very . We find increasing our network depth shows a significant improvement in accuracy. Our final model uses 20 weight layers. By cascading small filters many times in a deep network structure, contextual information over large image regions is exploited in an efficient way. With very deep networks, however, convergence speed becomes a critical issue during training. We propose a simple yet effective training procedure. We learn residuals only and use extremely high learning rates ( @math times higher than SRCNN dong2015image ) enabled by adjustable gradient clipping. Our proposed method performs better than existing methods in accuracy and visual improvements in our results are easily noticeable. We consider image transformation problems, where an input image is transformed into an output image. Recent methods for such problems typically train feed-forward convolutional neural networks using a loss between the output and ground-truth images. Parallel work has shown that high-quality images can be generated by defining and optimizing loss functions based on high-level features extracted from pretrained networks. We combine the benefits of both approaches, and propose the use of perceptual loss functions for training feed-forward networks for image transformation tasks. We show results on image style transfer, where a feed-forward network is trained to solve the optimization problem proposed by in real-time. Compared to the optimization-based method, our network gives similar qualitative results but is three orders of magnitude faster. We also experiment with single-image super-resolution, where replacing a per-pixel loss with a perceptual loss gives visually pleasing results. Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.