Enhancing Historical Aerial Photographs: A New Approach Based on Non-Reference Metric and Photo Interpretation Elements

Abstract

Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) is an effective state-of-the-art technique for enhancing low-resolution images. This study explains a hierarchical dataset structure within the scope of enhancing grayscale historical aerial photographs with a basic SR model and relates it to non-reference image quality metric. The dataset was structured based on the hierarchy of photo interpretation elements. Images of bare land and forestry areas were evaluated as the primary category containing tone and color elements, images of residential areas as the secondary category containing shape and size elements, and images of farmland areas as the tertiary category containing pattern elements. Instead of training all images in all categories at once, which is the issue that any SR model with low number of parameters has difficulty handling, each category was trained separately. Test images containing the features of each category were enhanced separately, which means three enhanced images for one test image. The obtained images were divided into equal parts of 5 × 5 pixel size, and the final image was created by concatenating those that were determined to be of higher quality based on the Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE) metric values. Subsequently, comparative analyses based on visual interpretation and reference-based image quality metrics proved that the approach to the dataset structure positively impacted the results.