Super-resolution Enhancement of Infrared Images Using a Lightweight Dense Residual Network

Existing infrared-guided weapons heavily rely on operators to acquire targets, and the accuracy of acquisition is positively correlated with a target's texture details. To improve the display quality of weak small regions and meet the design requirements of miniaturization, modularization, and low-cost seekers, an image super-resolution(SR) reconstruction algorithm based on a pyramid dense residual network is proposed. The dense residual network is the basic framework of the proposed model. Through the dense connection layer and the residual network, the model can learn the non-linear mapping between images of different scales, and the multi-scale feature can be used to predict the high-frequency residual. In addition, using the deep supervision module to guide network training is conducive to the realization of SR reconstruction with a larger upper-sampling factor and improvements to its generalization ability. A large number of simulation results show that our proposed model outperforms comparison algorithms and that it has a high engineering application value.