Enhanced Deep Learning Super-Resolution for Bathymetry Data

Spatial resolution is critical for observing and monitoring environmental phenomena. Acquiring high-resolution bathymetry data directly from satellites is not always feasible due to limitations on equipment, so spatial data scientists and researchers turn to single image super-resolution (SISR) methods that utilize deep learning techniques as an alternative method to increase pixel density. While super resolution residual networks (e.g., SR-ResNet) are promising for this purpose, several challenges still need to be addressed: (1) Earth data such as bathymetry is expensive to obtain and relatively limited in its data record amount; (2) certain domain knowledge needs to be complied with during model training; (3) certain areas of interest require more accurate measurements than other areas. To address these challenges, following the transfer learning principle, we study how to leverage an existing pre-trained super-resolution deep learning model, namely SR-ResNet, for high-resolution bathymetry data generation. We further enhance the SR-ResNet model to add corresponding loss functions based on domain knowledge. To let the model perform better for certain spatial areas, we add additional loss functions to increase the penalty of the areas of interest. Our experiments show our approaches achieve higher accuracy than most baseline models when evaluating using metrics including MSE, PSNR, and SSIM.