Super-Resolution of Solar Magnetograms via Adaptive Stratified Ensemble Learning with Uncertainty Estimation
Authors: Sina Norouzi Kandalan, Haodi Jiang, Jason T. L. Wang, Qin Li
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341, USA · Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA · Department of Physics, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
Single-image super-resolution of Sun's photospheric magnetograms enables consistent analysis across heterogeneous space-based instruments and supports long-term studies of solar magnetic field evolution. We address the super-resolution task from SOHO/MDI (low-resolution) to SDO/HMI (high-resolution) line-of-sight (LOS) magnetograms using a modified RRDBNet architecture initialized by ESRGAN pretrained weights. Through systematic per-image diagnostic analysis, we identify image complexity as the dominant predictor of reconstruction errors. To exploit this finding, we introduce an adaptive stratified specialist ensemble (SSE) of three specialist networks with uncertainty estimation, where each specialist network is trained by images from three different complexity strata using a weighted random sampling strategy. During inference, a lightweight router based on input image statistics assigns each test image to the appropriate specialist network. Our experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed ensemble and its superiority over closely related methods.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Comparison of MDI and HMI LOS magnetogram images. The left panel shows the MDI LOS magnetogram observed at 2010-05-01 00:00:00 UT, and the right panel shows the corresponding HMI LOS magnetogram observed at the same time.
Fig. 2: Distribution of LR pixel standard deviations over 1,493 LR training images, partitioned into three complexity buckets at the 33rd ( 0.0732 , blue dashed line) and 67th ( 0.1037 , green dashed line) percentiles. The right-skewed tail reflects active-region images with high magnetic complexity, motivating stratified training.
Fig. 3: Architecture of the baseline network, which is a modified RRDBNet, for ×4 solar magnetogram super-resolution. A learned input adapter (Conv2d 1→3 , 1×1 ) maps the single-channel LR magnetogram to 3 channels for the pretrained RRDB backbone. An SSIM-enhancer residual block and a PSNR refiner head bracket the trunk. A symmetric output adapter projects data back to 1 channel to produce the super-resolved (SR) output. A bicubic ×4 skip connection scaled by 0.10 provides a conservative bias correction.
Method
PSNR (dB)
SSIM
CC
SolarCNN [ 9 ]
37.40
0.9039
0.8842
RRDBNet [ 4 ]
36.56
0.9306
0.9262
Baseline Network
37.12
0.9399
0.9386
SSE
37.66
0.9443
0.9439
TABLE I: Performance Comparison of Studied Methods
Baseline Network
SSE
Bucket
PSNR
SSIM
CC
PSNR
SSIM
CC
Low ( n=17 )
39.29
0.9587
0.9339
39.77
0.9612
0.9399
Mid ( n=28 )
37.19
0.9387
0.9338
37.65
0.9431
0.9390
High ( n=31 )
35.86
0.9305
0.9445
36.50
0.9360
0.9506
TABLE II: Per-Bucket Comparison of the Baseline Network and SSE
Method
PSNR
SSIM
CC
SSEw
37.26
0.9395
0.9378
SSEwt
37.31
0.9400
0.9384
SSEwa
37.54
0.9430
0.9424
SSE
37.66
0.9443
0.9439
TABLE III: Ablation Results of the Proposed SSE Framework
Fig. 4: Results of a case study on a high-complexity test image observed at 2011-04-02 20:48 UT, routed to the high specialist network. (a) MDI LR input, with the red box indicating the region used for the qualitative and quantitative comparison in Figure 5 , (b) super-resolved/enhanced MDI (SSE output), (c) HMI ground truth, (d)–(e) pixel scatter plots of HMI vs. MDI and HMI vs. super-resolved/enhanced MDI, (f)–(i) four uncertainty maps.
Fig. 5: Qualitative and quantitative comparison of the zoomed-in region marked by the red box in Figure 4 (a). Shown in the figure are the MDI LR input, SolarCNN output, RRDBNet output, baseline network output, SSE output, and HMI ground truth along with three evaluation metric values.
Hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSI-SR) aims to recover spatial detail while preserving the spectral shape on which quantitative analysis relies. Recent HSI-SR methods, from repurposed RGB super-resolution backbones to dedicated spectral-spatial architectures, have greatly improved spatial reconstruction. However, overlooking the compact spectral structure of hyperspectral data leaves residual spectral errors, while binding the spectral treatment to each architecture forces it to be rebuilt for every new backbone. Yet the low-dimensional structure of spectra belongs to the data, not to any backbone. Backbones differ in the errors they leave, but not in the structure of the true spectra. One rectifier design can therefore serve any backbone. Building on this insight, we propose the \textbf{S}pectral \textbf{R}ectification \textbf{S}uper-\textbf{R}esolution Network (\textbf{SR2-Net}), a model-agnostic rectifier that needs nothing from the backbone but its output, leaves its internal architecture untouched, and is trained per backbone. SR2-Net follows an \emph{enhance-then-rectify} pipeline in which Hierarchical Spectral-Spatial Synergy Attention (\textbf{H-S3A}) reinforces cross-band interactions, while Mode-Constrained Rectification (\textbf{MCR}) confines the correction to a learned compact spectral subspace. A degradation-consistency constraint further ties the output to the observed low-resolution input. Experiments with five backbones spanning CNN, Transformer, and diffusion families show that one fixed configuration improves spectral fidelity in every reported setting while preserving or improving spatial quality. Averaged over thirty in-domain settings, SR2-Net removes 22.6% of the residual spectral error at a backbone-independent cost of 0.048M parameters.
Ji-Xuan He, Guohang Zhuang, Bo Junge +5
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University · School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology
Sentinel-5P (S5P) plays a critical role in atmospheric monitoring; however, its spatial resolution limits fine-scale analysis. Existing super-resolution (SR) approaches rely on supervised learning with synthetic low-resolution (LR) data, since true high-resolution (HR) data do not exist, limiting their applicability to real observations. We propose a self-supervised hyperspectral SR framework for S5P that enables training without HR ground truth. The method combines Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) with an equivariant imaging constraint, incorporating the S5P degradation operator and noise statistics derived from signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) metadata. We also introduce depthwise separable convolution U-Net architectures designed for efficiency and spectral fidelity. The framework is evaluated in two settings: (i) LR-HR, where synthetic LR data are used for direct comparison with supervised learning, and (ii) GT-SHR, where super-resolved images surpass the native spatial resolution without HR reference. Results across multiple bands show that self-supervised models achieve performance comparable to supervised methods while maintaining strong consistency. Qualitative analysis shows improved spatial detail over bicubic interpolation, and validation with EMIT data confirms that reconstructed structures are physically meaningful. Code is available at https://github.com/hyamomar/Sentinel-5P-Super-Resolution/tree/main/self_supervised
Hyam Omar Ali, Antoine Crosnier, Romain Abraham +3
Université d’Orléans, Université de Tours, CNRS, IDP, UMR 7013, Orléans, France · Faculty of Mathematical Sciences, University of Khartoum, Sudan · ENS Lyon, France +2
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.
Dawid Kopeć, Katarzyna Jabłońska, Wojciech Kozłowski +1