Resolution Transfer for Object Detection from Satellite Imagery

Smallsat constellations are an increasingly common source of global-scale overhead imagery that are refreshed with a higher frequency than traditional satellites. The smaller size and lower cost of smallsats enable frequent revisits, but result in images with lower resolution and quality than the high resolution (HR) images from traditional satellites. In order to benefit from the increased temporal frequency provided by smallsat constellations, new approaches are needed to automatically detect objects in their imagery. We present a super resolution (SR) approach that incorporates domain adaptation (DA) to enable object detection from low resolution (LR) images without the need for paired training data or annotations in the LR domain. Our Resolution Transfer approach addresses the resolution and quality loss for smallsats, as demonstrated via airplane detection.