Visible-Assisted Infrared Image Super-Resolution Based on Spatial Attention Residual Network

Infrared images have a wide range of applications in military and civilian fields, including night vision, surveillance, and robotics. However, the most commonly used infrared images are low-resolution (LR), which lack texture details, and existing infrared image super-resolution (SR) algorithms are limited by the lack of spatial information utilization. To solve the above problems, a spatial attention residual network (SAResNet) is proposed. Specifically, the network consists of spatial attention residual block (SARB) with several short skip connections (SSCs). The SARB contains 20 spatial attention blocks (SAB), which adaptively adjusts weights of different spatial regions by considering interdependence between spatial features. Meanwhile, the visible images are considered as complementary sources; thus, a visible-assisted training strategy is designed for the infrared SR process, promoting details preservation. Furthermore, the spatial attention (SA) mechanism is utilized, which focuses more on spatial characteristics of the image and refines the main objects and target boundaries. Experimentally, the proposed method, SAResNet, is compared with existing SR methods, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated based on both quantity and quality analyses.