InfScene-SR: Seamless Super-Resolution of Arbitrarily Large Remote-Sensing Scenes via Variance-Preserving Joint Denoising
Authors: Shoukun Sun, Zhe Wang, Xiang Que, Jiyin Zhang, Xiaogang Ma
Organizations: University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, USA · NCEAS, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA · Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, China
Diffusion models now give the best perceptual quality in super-resolution (SR), but their architecture and training confine them to small fixed crops. Operational remote sensing needs seamless scenes orders of magnitude larger. Joint denoising fuses overlapping tiles at every reverse step and lets text-to-image diffusion generate beyond its training crop, but it assumes deterministic ODE samplers. With the stochastic sampler of SR models such as SR3, the averaging also partly cancels independent per-tile noise. This known variance erosion blurs the detail SR should recover and must be corrected. We carry variance-corrected fusion to conditional SR and derive Spatially-Decoupled Variance Correction (SDVC), an exact reformulation that replaces per-step global normalization with independent per-tile contributions accumulated in one additive pass. SDVC turns the coupled per-step computation into independent tile-local work, so the resulting pipeline, InfScene-SR, runs in parallel across GPUs and makes SR of arbitrarily large scenes feasible. On a 5× SR task built from NAIP aerial imagery, we evaluate whole scenes with fidelity, perceptual, seam-continuity, and faithfulness metrics. Under one backbone, InfScene-SR is the only fusion strategy that is seamless and sharp at once, the closest to the low-resolution observation among those that synthesize detail, and within 0.003 IoU of native high-resolution imagery on downstream invasive-plant segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/TitorX/infscene-sr.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: 5 × SR of the 21-megapixel NAIP test scene. Stitching independently denoised tiles leaves seams and per-tile drift (left); InfScene-SR denoises 143 overlapping tiles jointly into one seamless, sharp sample (center). Right: detail at a four-tile corner—bicubic is blurry, stitching breaks, ours is sharp and continuous, matching native HR.
Figure 2: Reverse step of InfScene-SR. The scene canvas yt is cropped into overlapping views; per-device workers run one sampler step and emit a tile-local SDVC contribution Ct(i) (Eq. 7 ), accumulated additively, into the canvas for step t−1 . Repeated for t=T,…,1 , the scene evolves as one consistent sample; independent per-tile denoising with stitching (bottom right) leaves seams and per-tile drift.
Figure 3: Variance erosion in the dense-overlap regime. Left: naive averaging (Eq. 3 ) collapses stochastic detail into an over-smoothed reconstruction. Center: variance-corrected fusion (Eq. 5 ) restores sharp texture. Right: ground truth.
Figure 4: Left: study area—2024 NAIP over 15 coastal California counties; Santa Barbara County held out. Right: expert iceplant annotations (green) on the 2024 test scene.
Method
Stride
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
KID ↓ ( ×10−2 )
LR-PSNR ↑
SGI →0
Bicubic
—
28.77
0.715
0.569
90.13
7.20
42.03
−0.01
Independent + stitching
512
17.32
0.583
0.352
65.97
4.02
17.85
4.25
Independent + blending
384
17.66
0.617
0.342
65.95
4.07
18.14
0.88
Joint + naive averaging (Eq. 3 )
384
21.50
0.480
0.649
121.30
9.78
25.30
−0.03
InfScene-SR (ours, Eq. 7 )
384
19.55
0.634
0.283
40.78
1.82
20.37
0.03
+ LF projection (Eq. 9 )
384
27.07
0.632
0.217
30.73
0.95
45.10
0.03
Table 1: Whole-scene comparison on the 4329×4818 NAIP test scene (5 × SR). All learned rows share one SR3 checkpoint and seed and differ only in the fusion strategy. Bold: best per column (closest to 0 for SGI, Sec. 4.2 ; bicubic is untiled and marks its zero point). The italic row post-processes our output using only the observed LR input (Sec. 5.2 ); it is a diagnostic and is not ranked.
Figure 5: Whole-scene comparison under the identical backbone: reconstruction, per-pixel ∣ error ∣ , and local texture energy relative to HR.
Input
Acc. ↑
Prec. ↑
Rec. ↑
F1 ↑
IoU ↑
HR (native)
0.911
0.837
0.889
0.862
0.758
Bicubic
0.895
0.797
0.889
0.841
0.725
Indep. + stitching
0.896
0.837
0.828
0.833
0.713
Indep. + blending
0.906
0.838
0.864
0.851
0.741
Joint + naive avg.
0.883
0.903
0.700
0.788
0.651
InfScene-SR
0.914
0.873
0.849
0.861
0.755
Table 2: Downstream iceplant segmentation (HR-trained U-Net, 2024 test scene). Bold: best per column among reconstructions (HR is the reference, not ranked).
Figure 6: Resident GPU memory of the fusion layer per reverse step (float32; backbone excluded). Centralized VCF (Eq. 5 ) must hold every tile’s state and mean, so its footprint grows with scene area; SDVC holds one batch of tiles at any size ( 7× less on the 143-tile test scene). Dotted: the O(HW) canvas and accumulator, streamed from host or disk; ⋆ : the full 3.4-Gpx NAIP raster of the test county.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Method
Stride
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
KID ↓ ( ×10−2 )
LR-PSNR ↑
SGI →0
Bicubic
—
28.77
0.715
0.569
90.13
7.20
42.03
−0.01
Independent + stitching
512
17.32
0.583
0.352
65.97
4.02
17.85
4.25
Independent + blending
384
17.66
0.617
0.342
65.95
4.07
18.14
0.88
Joint + naive averaging
384
21.50
0.480
0.649
121.30
9.78
25.30
−0.03
InfScene-SR
384
19.55
0.634
0.283
40.78
1.82
20.37
0.03
with LF projection (main paper Eq. 9):
Appendix
Table S1 : Complete whole-scene metric suite on the 4329×4818 NAIP test scene. The upper block is main paper Table 1 without its projected row; the lower block applies the LF projection to every strategy. Bold marks the best per column within each block. SGI is a diagnostic and is not ranked (target 0 ; negative values mean boundaries smoother than native imagery). After projection every strategy agrees with the observation by construction, so LR-PSNR no longer separates the rows.
Figure S1 : Crop-level comparison across three land-cover types. Rows: ruins and corrals, iceplant mosaic, surf zone. Each inset magnifies the marked square 2.4× .
Figure S2 : The dense-overlap collapse at one further location in each controlled window. Same controlled pairs as main paper Fig. 3, two 1024×1024 crops at patch 512 and stride 128 (up to 22 tiles per pixel), one checkpoint and one seed ( 42 ), with avg against sdvc fusion as the only difference and no LF projection. W5 is the rail crossing, W3 the farmstead.
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Ce Wang, Zhenyu Hu, Wanjie Sun
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University; Wuhan 430079, China
Real-world image super-resolution is particularly challenging for diffusion models because real degradations are complex, heterogeneous, and rarely modeled explicitly. We propose a degradation-aware and structure-preserving diffusion framework for real-world SR. Specifically, we introduce Degradation-aware Token Injection, which encodes lightweight degradation statistics from low-resolution inputs and fuses them with semantic conditioning features, enabling explicit degradation-aware restoration. We further propose Spatially Asymmetric Noise Injection, which modulates diffusion noise with local edge strength to better preserve structural regions during training. Both modules are lightweight add-ons to the adopted diffusion SR framework, requiring only minor modifications to the conditioning pipeline. Experiments on DIV2K and RealSR show that our method delivers competitive no-reference perceptual quality and visually more realistic restoration results than recent baselines, while maintaining a favorable perception--distortion trade-off. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of each module and their complementary gains when combined. The code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/jiyang0315/DASP-SR.git.
Yang Ji, Zonghao Chen, Zhihao Xue +1
KUNBYTE Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China · GOLDMYE Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
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