MRDAM: Satellite Cloud Image Super-Resolution via Multi-Scale Residual Deformable Attention Mechanism

High-resolution meteorological satellite cloud imagery plays a crucial role in diagnosing and forecasting severe convective weather phenomena characterized by suddenness and locality, such as tropical cyclones. However, constrained by imaging principles and various internal/external interferences during satellite data acquisition, current satellite imagery often fails to meet the spatiotemporal resolution requirements for fine-scale monitoring of these weather systems. Particularly for real-time tracking of tropical cyclone genesis-evolution dynamics and capturing detailed cloud structure variations within cyclone cores, existing spatial resolutions remain insufficient. Therefore, developing super-resolution techniques for meteorological satellite cloud imagery through software-based approaches holds significant application potential. This paper proposes a Multi-scale Residual Deformable Attention Model (MRDAM) based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), specifically designed for satellite cloud image super-resolution tasks considering their morphological diversity and non-rigid deformation characteristics. The generator architecture incorporates two key components: a Multi-scale Feature Progressive Fusion Module (MFPFM), which enhances texture detail preservation and spectral consistency in reconstructed images, and a Deformable Attention Additive Fusion Module (DAAFM), which captures irregular cloud pattern features through adaptive spatial-attention mechanisms. Comparative experiments against multiple GAN-based super-resolution baselines demonstrate that MRDAM achieves superior performance in both objective evaluation metrics (PSNR/SSIM) and subjective visual quality, proving its superior performance for satellite cloud image super-resolution tasks.