EDiffSR: An Efficient Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

Recently, convolutional networks have achieved remarkable development in remote sensing image (RSI) super-resolution (SR) by minimizing the regression objectives, e.g., MSE loss. However, despite achieving impressive performance, these methods often suffer from poor visual quality with oversmooth issues. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have the potential to infer intricate details, but they are easy to collapse, resulting in undesirable artifacts. To mitigate these issues, in this article, we first introduce diffusion probabilistic model (DPM) for efficient RSI SR, dubbed efficient diffusion model for RSI SR (EDiffSR). EDiffSR is easy to train and maintains the merits of DPM in generating perceptual-pleasant images. Specifically, different from previous works using heavy UNet for noise prediction, we develop an efficient activation network (EANet) to achieve favorable noise prediction performance by simplified channel attention and simple gate operation, which dramatically reduces the computational budget. Moreover, to introduce more valuable prior knowledge into the proposed EDiffSR, a practical conditional prior enhancement module (CPEM) is developed to help extract an enriched condition. Unlike most DPM-based SR models that directly generate conditions by amplifying LR images, the proposed CPEM helps to retain more informative cues for accurate SR. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing datasets demonstrate that EDiffSR can restore visual-pleasant images on simulated and real-world RSIs, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code of EDiffSR will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/EDiffSR .