Semantic-Guided Flow Matching for Fast and Accurate Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Zhicheng Gong, Fangzhou Yi, Ling Guan, Chunzhu Dong, Hui Zeng · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing · 2025
Current diffusion-based super-resolution methods for remote sensing images face two critical limitations: (1) excessive computational demands due to iterative sampling; and (2) semantic inconsistency in reconstructed images caused by stochastic denoising. To address these challenges, we propose SfmSR, a Semantics-guided Flow Matching model that achieves fast (1-5 steps) and accurate reconstruction through a novel two-stage framework. Stage 1 performs large-scale pre-training on diverse remote sensing data to learn robust multi-scale representations, while Stage 2 introduces semantic-guided fine-tuning, where extracted high-level features dynamically regulate the flow matching process. This dual-phase approach reduces sampling steps by two orders of magnitude while maintaining stability through deterministic ODE-based generation. Experimental results demonstrate that SfmSR outperforms existing methods on remote sensing image datasets such as Potsdam and Toronto. Moreover, SfmSR exhibits significant advantages in model complexity and inference efficiency, achieving fast inference with fewer parameters and lower memory usage, thus meeting real-time requirements in practical applications. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, SfmSR not only achieves superior reconstruction quality but also demonstrates clear advantages in inference speed and computational efficiency.