Land Surface Temperature Super-Resolution with a Scale-Invariance-Free Neural Approach: Application to MODIS

Due to the trade-off between the temporal and spatial resolution of thermal spaceborne sensors, super-resolution methods have been developed to provide fine-scale Land SurfaceTemperature (LST) maps. Most of them are trained at low resolution but applied at fine resolution, and so they require a scale-invariance hypothesis that is not always adapted. Themain contribution of this work is the introduction of a Scale-Invariance-Free approach for training Neural Network (NN) models, and the implementation of two NN models, calledScale-Invariance-Free Convolutional Neural Network for Super-Resolution (SIF-CNN-SR) for the super-resolution of MODIS LST products. The Scale-Invariance-Free approach consists ontraining the models in order to provide LST maps at high spatial resolution that recover the initial LST when they are degraded at low resolution and that contain fine-scale texturesinformed by the high resolution NDVI. The second contribution of this work is the release of a test database with ASTER LST images concomitant with MODIS ones that can be usedfor evaluation of super-resolution algorithms. We compare the two proposed models, SIF-CNN-SR1 and SIF-CNN-SR2, with four state-of-the-art methods, Bicubic, DMS, ATPRK, Tsharp,and a CNN sharing the same architecture as SIF-CNN-SR but trained under the scale-invariance hypothesis. We show that SIF-CNN-SR1 outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and the other two CNN models as evaluated with LPIPS and Fourier space metrics focusing on the analysis of textures. These results and the available ASTER-MODIS database for evaluation are promising for future studies on super-resolution of LST.

Convolutional Neural Network Modelling for MODIS Land Surface Temperature Super-Resolution

Nowadays, thermal infrared satellite remote sensors enable to extract very interesting information at large scale, in particular Land Surface Temperature (LST). However such data are limited in spatial and/or temporal resolutions which prevents from an analysis at fine scales. For example, MODIS satellite provides daily acquisitions with 1Km spatial resolutions which is not sufficient to deal with highly heterogeneous environments as agricultural parcels. Therefore, image super-resolution is a crucial task to better exploit MODIS LSTs. This issue is tackled in this paper. We introduce a deep learning-based algorithm, named Multi-residual U-Net, for super-resolution of MODIS LST single-images. Our proposed network is a modified version of U-Net architecture, which aims at super-resolving the input LST image from 1Km to 250m per pixel. The results show that our Multi-residual U-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.