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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-M-6-2025-61-2025</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Tiny Object Detection in Super-Resolved Sentinel-2 Imagery</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ayala</surname>
<given-names>Christian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Amieva</surname>
<given-names>Juan Francisco</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Vega</surname>
<given-names>Pablo</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Perko</surname>
<given-names>Roland</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Aleksandrowicz</surname>
<given-names>Sebastian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Tracasa Instrumental, Calle Cabárceno 6, 31621 Sarriguren, Spain</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Leonhardstrasse 59, 8010 Graz, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences - Bartycka 18A, 00-716 Wasaw, Poland</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>19</day>
<month>05</month>
<year>2025</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLVIII-M-6-2025</volume>
<fpage>61</fpage>
<lpage>66</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2025 Christian Ayala et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2025</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-M-6-2025/61/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-M-6-2025-61-2025.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-M-6-2025/61/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-M-6-2025-61-2025.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-M-6-2025/61/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-M-6-2025-61-2025.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-M-6-2025/61/2025/isprs-archives-XLVIII-M-6-2025-61-2025.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The detection of tiny objects in satellite imagery is a critical task with wide-ranging applications, including environmental monitoring, urban planning, disaster response, and the surveillance of critical transport infrastructure. Sentinel-2 satellite data, characterized by providing rich spectral information at a moderate spatial resolution (10&amp;ndash;60m), poses significant challenges for the identification of small-scale features due to limited spatial detail and the effects of mixed pixels. This study investigates the potential of super-resolution techniques to enhance Sentinel-2 imagery for improved tiny object detection. A dataset was meticulously annotated to identify aircraft across diverse areas of interest, enabling rigorous evaluation using advanced methodologies. Detection was performed using a hybrid approach that combines a YOLOv8-based object detector and a vision-transformer-based object density estimator. The fusion of these complementary methods significantly reduces false positives, resulting in improvements in precision and F1 score. The findings underscore that super-resolved Sentinel-2 imagery offers a viable and cost-effective solution for detecting tiny objects, particularly in scenarios where access to high-resolution imagery is restricted or economically prohibitive.</p>
</abstract>
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