LRF-SRNet: Large-Scale Super-Resolution Network for Estimating Aircraft Pose on the Airport Surface

The introduction of various deep neural network architectures has greatly advanced aircraft pose estimation using high-resolution images. However, realistic airport surface monitors typically take low-resolution (LR) images, and the results of the aircraft pose estimation are far from being accurate enough to be considered acceptable because of long-range capture. To fill this gap, we propose a brand-new, end-to-end low-resolution aircraft pose estimate network (LRF-SRNet) to address the problem of estimating the pose of poor-quality airport surface surveillance aircraft images. The method successfully combines the pose estimation method with the super-resolution (SR) technique. Specifically, to reconstruct high-resolution aircraft images, a super-resolution network (SRNet) is created. In addition, an essential component termed the large receptive field block (LRF block) helps estimate the aircraft’s pose. By broadening the neural network’s receptive field, it enables the perception of the aircraft’s structure. Experimental results demonstrate that, on the airport surface surveillance dataset, our method performs significantly better than the most widely used baseline methods, with AP exceeding Baseline and HRNet by 3.1% and 4.5%.