Dawid Kopeć | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Mind the Gap: Quantifying the Domain Gap in Cross-Sensor Diffusion Super-Resolution

Demand for high-resolution satellite imagery has increased interest in super-resolution (SR) to bridge the spatial resolution gap between freely available missions such as Sentinel-2 and commercial systems like PlanetScope. Because no sensor provides true paired low- and high-resolution observations, SR models are usually trained on synthetically degraded data, creating a domain gap on real cross-sensor imagery. In this work, we provide the first systematic study of how this synthetic-to-real mismatch affects the performance of modern diffusion-based SR models. Using a large, geometrically and temporally aligned dataset of Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery, we evaluate five state-of-the-art diffusion architectures under controlled experimental settings. We also introduce LPIPS-Sat, a domain-adapted perceptual metric based on Sentinel-2 self-supervised features. Our results show two persistent challenges: synthetically trained models degrade sharply on real pairs, while models trained on real cross-sensor data exhibit optimisation difficulties and struggle to adapt to the physical and radiometric diversity. These findings highlight a key limitation of current SR and motivate methods that disentangle super-resolution from domain adaptation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SupResDiffGAN a new approach for the Super-Resolution task

In this work, we present SupResDiffGAN, a novel hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models for super-resolution tasks. By leveraging latent space representations and reducing the number of diffusion steps, SupResDiffGAN achieves significantly faster inference times than other diffusion-based super-resolution models while maintaining competitive perceptual quality. To prevent discriminator overfitting, we propose adaptive noise corruption, ensuring a stable balance between the generator and the discriminator during training. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms traditional diffusion models such as SR3 and I$^2$SB in efficiency and image quality. This work bridges the performance gap between diffusion- and GAN-based methods, laying the foundation for real-time applications of diffusion models in high-resolution image generation.

eess.IV↗