Spatial-Temporal Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery via Conditional Pixel Synthesis

Yutong He, Dingjie Wang, Nicholas Lai, William Zhang, Chenlin Meng, Marshall Burke, David Lobell, Stefano Ermon

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)

High-resolution satellite imagery has proven useful for a broad range of tasks, including measurement of global human population, local economic livelihoods, and biodiversity, among many others. Unfortunately, high-resolution imagery is both infrequently collected and expensive to purchase, making it hard to efficiently and effectively scale these downstream tasks over both time and space. We propose a new conditional pixel synthesis model that uses abundant, low-cost, low-resolution imagery to generate accurate high-resolution imagery at locations and times in which it is unavailable. We show that our model attains photo-realistic sample quality and outperforms competing baselines on a key downstream task – object counting – particularly in geographic locations where conditions on the ground are changing rapidly.