From Super-Resolution to Superior Land Cover Detection: Cross-Channel Attention Network for Aerial Image

Abstract

Abstract. Low-resolution imagery is a major constraint for remote sensing tasks (e.g., urban land cover detection) where accurate classification of buildings, roads, vegetation, and small objects is required. Deep learning-based segmentation models are highly sensitive to image quality, resulting in degraded performance on low-resolution inputs. Super-resolution (SR) techniques offer a promising solution by enhancing image fidelity to support downstream tasks. This work applied MAPSRNet, a Multi-Attention Pyramid SR Network to aerial images used for multi-class land cover detection. Evaluated on the ISPRS Potsdam dataset, MAPSRNet achieves state-of-the-art SR performance with PSNR of 32.92 dB and SSIM of 0.87, outperforming existing methods such as SRCNN (31.54 dB, 0.83) and DRRN (31.03 dB, 0.82) while maintaining competitive inference speed. Beyond image quality, MAPSRNet significantly improves multi-class land cover segmentation when integrated with a ConvNeXtV2-based U-Net, achieving an overall accuracy of 80.60%, mean IoU of 62.54%, and FwIoU of 68.34%, surpassing not only low-resolution inputs (Overall Accuracy: 65.28%, mIoU: 40.20%, FwIoU: 50.12%) but also high-resolution(HR) ones (Overall Accuracy: 80.50%, mIoU: 62.40%, FwIoU: 68.01%), especially in certain classes such as impervious surface and clutter. These results demonstrate that perceptual and structural fidelity, rather than pixel-level similarity, can drive superior performance in urban land cover segmentation. MAPSRNet offers a practical solution for scenarios where HR imagery is limited or unavailable, highlighting its potential for large-scale remote sensing applications.