Satellite imagery super-resolution using GANs and aerial images

Abstract

Satellite imagery often suffers from limited spatial resolution and, in many cases, high acquisition costs. These factors restrict their use in applications such as urban monitoring, land management, and wildlife studies. This work proposes an AI-based super-resolution approach that leverages high resolution aerial imagery to train a Generative Adversarial Network. Specifically, the ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network) architecture is adapted and trained using aerial orthophotos, enabling the transfer of learned spatial representations to low-resolution satellite images. The trained model is evaluated on satellite image patches at 2 and 4 super-resolution scales. Performance is assessed using structural, perceptual, and chromatic metrics, including SSIMY, MS-SSIM, LPIPS and CIEDE2000. The results show clear improvements, with increased sharpness, enhanced edge definition, and consistent reconstruction of urban structures and terrain features. From a quantitative perspective, the 2 scale achieves the best overall metric values, while the 4 scale maintains stable and meaningful performance despite the higher reconstruction difficulty. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of transferring super-resolution capabilities from aerial images to satellite imagery, even in the presence of spectral and geometric differences between acquisition domains. Overall, this study provides a solid foundation for the development of low-cost, AI-driven satellite image super-resolution models and outlines future research directions focused on dataset expansion, domain adaptation strategies, and sensor-specific architectural improvements.