CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK BASED DEM SUPER RESOLUTION

Abstract. DEM super resolution is proposed in our previous publication to improve the resolution for a DEM on basis of some learning examples. Meanwhile, the nonlocal algorithm is introduced to deal with it and lots of experiments show that the strategy is feasible. In our publication, the learning examples are defined as the partial original DEM and their related high measurements due to this way can avoid the incompatibility between the data to be processed and the learning examples. To further extent the applications of this new strategy, the learning examples should be diverse and easy to obtain. Yet, it may cause the problem of incompatibility and unrobustness. To overcome it, we intend to investigate a convolutional neural network based method. The input of the convolutional neural network is a low resolution DEM and the output is expected to be its high resolution one. A three layers model will be adopted. The first layer is used to detect some features from the input, the second integrates the detected features to some compressed ones and the final step transforms the compressed features as a new DEM. According to this designed structure, some learning DEMs will be taken to train it. Specifically, the designed network will be optimized by minimizing the error of the output and its expected high resolution DEM. In practical applications, a testing DEM will be input to the convolutional neural network and a super resolution will be obtained. Many experiments show that the CNN based method can obtain better reconstructions than many classic interpolation methods.