FEGAN: A Feature-Oriented Enhanced GAN for Enhancing Thermal Image Super-Resolution

Infrared thermal imaging presents significant potential in various domains. However, the widespread development of this technology is hindered by the high cost associated with acquiring high-quality thermal imaging sensors. To overcome this challenge, super-resolution techniques have emerged as a viable solution for extracting valuable information from low-resolution thermal images. While generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been widely adopted for thermal imaging super-resolution, their performance is limited by the inherent lack of detail in low-resolution training images, resulting in reduced fidelity and accuracy in generating high-resolution reconstructions. To tackle this challenge, this letter introduces FEGAN, a novel approach that enhances the performance of GANs by incorporating a feature-oriented enhanced (FE) mechanism within the generative network (GN). The FE plays a pivotal role in extracting high-frequency texture and edge details from low-resolution inputs and reconstructing them into enhanced images. This process substantially improves textures and edges within the training set of thermal images. Furthermore, refinements have been applied to both the GN and the discriminative network (DN) to enhance feature extraction efficiency. The experimental findings unequivocally demonstrate the superior performance of FEGAN compared to state-of-the-art methods. FEGAN achieves impressive performance metrics, including PSNR of 27.18, SSIM of 0.6523, FSIM of 0.5500, and LPIPS of 0.1221, highlighting its remarkable capabilities in the realm of thermal image super-resolution.