SEN2VENµS, a Dataset for the Training of Sentinel-2 Super-Resolution Algorithms

Abstract

Boosted by the progress in deep learning, Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) has gained a lot of interest in the Remote Sensing community, who sees it as an oportunity to compensate for satellite's ever-limited spatial resolution with respect to end users needs. While there has been a great amount of work on network architures in the latest years, deep learning based SISR in remote sensing is still limited by the availability of the large training sets it requires. The lack of publicly available large datasets with the required variability in terms of landscapes and seasons pushes researchers to simulate their own dataset by means of downsampling. This may impair the applicability of the trained model on real world data at the target input resolution. In this paper, we propose an open-data licenced dataset composed of 10m and 20m cloud-free surface reflectance patches from Sentinel-2, with their reference spatially-registered surface reflectance patches at 5 meter resolution acquired on the same day by the VENµS satellite. This dataset covers 29 locations on earth with a total of 132 955 patches of 256x256 pixels at 5 meters resolution, and can be used for the training of super-resolution algorithms to bring the spatial resolution of 8 of the Sentinel-2 bands down to 5 meters.