D-SRGAN: DEM Super-Resolution with Generative Adversarial Networks
This addresses the lack of high-resolution DEMs for applications like flood mapping, but it is incremental as it adapts existing super-resolution methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of generating high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) from low-resolution LIDAR data, using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to increase spatial resolution by up to 4 times without extra data.
LIDAR (light detection and ranging) is an optical remote-sensing technique that measures the distance between sensor and object, and the reflected energy from the object. Over the years, LIDAR data has been used as the primary source of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). DEMs have been used in a variety of applications like road extraction, hydrological modeling, flood mapping, and surface analysis. A number of studies in flooding suggest the usage of high-resolution DEMs as inputs in the applications improve the overall reliability and accuracy. Despite the importance of high-resolution DEM, many areas in the United States and the world do not have access to high-resolution DEM due to technological limitations or the cost of the data collection. With recent development in Graphical Processing Units (GPU) and novel algorithms, deep learning techniques have become attractive to researchers for their performance in learning features from high-resolution datasets. Numerous new methods have been proposed such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create intelligent models that correct and augment large-scale datasets. In this paper, a GAN based model is developed and evaluated, inspired by single image super-resolution methods, to increase the spatial resolution of a given DEM dataset up to 4 times without additional information related to data.