Research on the application of remote sensing image super-resolution reconstruction techniques in crop phenology extraction

Crop phenology is one of the most critical physiological attributes of agricultural crops, serving as a direct indicator of growth status throughout the developmental cycle. With the advancement of phenological research, satellite remote sensing has emerged as a primary monitoring tool due to its large spatial coverage and convenient data acquisition. However, high-resolution remote sensing satellites, which are essential for precise phenological observations, often have long revisit intervals. Additionally, adverse atmospheric conditions such as cloud cover frequently compromise the usability of images on multiple dates. As a result, high-resolution time-series data for crop phenology monitoring are typically sparse, limiting the ability to capture rapid phenological changes during the growing season.To address this challenge, this study focuses on paddy and dryland fields as experimental sites and proposes a novel method for filling temporal gaps in remote sensing data using generative image processing techniques. Specifically, a lightweight super-resolution Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is developed for image reconstruction. Using the reconstructed dataset, dense time-series monitoring and phenological metric extraction were conducted throughout the crop growing season.(1) The proposed super-resolution reconstruction method achieves structural similarity index (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values of 0.834 and 28.69, respectively, outperforming mainstream approaches in reconstructing heterogeneous remote sensing data.(2) Following temporal reconstruction, the revisit intervals of remote sensing imagery for the two test sites improved from 6.40 and 6.63 days to 5.70 and 5.88 days, respectively. To further analyze phenological metrics, four smoothing techniques were applied, among which Savitzky-Golay filtering yielded the most accurate and robust results. Although discrepancies were observed between the results obtained using the reconstructed data and those based on the original datasets, the proposed method demonstrated smaller deviations from benchmark datasets. Compared with conventional interpolation-based gap-filling approaches, the framework demonstrated marked improvements in the accuracy of phenological extraction, while also delivering superior spatial resolution and robustness relative to the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel (HLS) dataset. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach effectively fills temporal gaps in satellite imagery, enhances data continuity, accurately captures key phenological turning points, and enables precise crop phenology monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution.