Performance evaluation of super-resolution techniques for characterization and phenotyping of commodity crops using multispectral imagery

Abstract

Multispectral imagery provides spectral information beyond the visible range for vegetation monitoring, but it typically suffers from limited spatial resolution, which can obscure fine crop structures and affect vegetation-index (VI) estimates.} This study evaluates whether single-image super-resolution (SISR) methods developed for red, green, and blue (RGB) imagery can enhance the spatial resolution of red, green, and near-infrared (RGN) crop images while preserving spectral fidelity. Eight pretrained methods are applied directly to RGN images without fine-tuning: bicubic and nearest-neighbor interpolation, Real-ESRGAN, HAT, HiT-SR, SRFormer, ResShift, and StableSR. Reconstruction at $4\times$ and $16\times$ is evaluated for whole images and manually segmented leaf regions. Reconstruction quality is assessed using mean absolute error (MAE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), spectral angle mapper (SAM), and erreur relative globale adimensionnelle de synthèse (ERGAS). Eight VIs, computed from reference and super-resolved images, are evaluated using MAE, PSNR, and SSIM. Transformer-based methods \modification{significantly} outperform GAN- and diffusion-based approaches in both evaluation settings \modification{($p < 0.001$)}, with \modification{HAT, HiT-SR, and SRFormer forming the highest-performing statistical tier}. These findings indicate that RGB-trained SISR can enhance spatial detail in RGN crop imagery while maintaining spectral consistency and VI reliability for high-resolution crop phenotyping.