COMPARISON OF MULTI-IMAGES DEEP LEARNING SUPER RESOLUTION FOR PASSIVE MICROWAVE IMAGES OF ARCTIC SEA ICE

Abstract. The observation of Arctic sea ice is of great significance to monitoring of the polar environment, research on global climate change and application of Arctic navigation. Compared to optical imagery and SAR imagery, passive microwave images can be obtained for all-sky conditions with high time resolution. However, the spatial resolution of passive microwave images is relatively low (6.25 km – 25 km) for the observation of detailed sea ice characteristics and small-scale sea ice geographical phenomena. Therefore, in this paper, considering the suitability of different alignment and fusion strategies to the characteristics of passive microwave images of sea ice, two multi-images deep learning super-resolution (SR) algorithms, Recurrent Back-Projection Network (RBPN) and network of Temporal Group Attention (TGA), are selected to test the effects of SR technique for passive microwave images of sea ice. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons are provided for the SR results oriented from two algorithms. Overall, the SR performance of TGA algorithm outperforms RBPN algorithm for the passive microwave images of sea ice.