MAF-GAN: A Multi-Attention Fusion Generative Adversarial Network for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

Existing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) frequently yield remote sensing images with blurred fine details, distorted textures, and compromised spatial structures when applied to super-resolution (SR) tasks, so this study proposes a Multi-Attention Fusion Generative Adversarial Network (MAF-GAN) to address these limitations: the generator of MAF-GAN is built on a U-Net backbone, which incorporates Oriented Convolutions (OrientedConv) to enhance the extraction of directional features and textures, while a novel co-calibration mechanism—incorporating channel, spatial, gating, and spectral attention—is embedded in the encoding path and skip connections, supplemented by an adaptive weighting strategy to enable effective multi-scale feature fusion, and a composite loss function is further designed to integrate adversarial loss, perceptual loss, hybrid pixel loss, total variation loss, and feature consistency loss for optimizing model performance; extensive experiments on the GF7-SR4×-MSD dataset demonstrate that MAF-GAN achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 27.14 dB, Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.7206, Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) of 0.1017, and Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) of 1.0871, which significantly outperforms mainstream models including SRGAN, ESRGAN, SwinIR, HAT, and ESatSR as well as exceeds traditional interpolation methods (e.g., Bicubic) by a substantial margin, and notably, MAF-GAN maintains an excellent balance between reconstruction quality and inference efficiency to further reinforce its advantages over competing methods; additionally, ablation studies validate the individual contribution of each proposed component to the model’s overall performance, and this method generates super-resolution remote sensing images with more natural visual perception, clearer spatial structures, and superior spectral fidelity, thus offering a reliable technical solution for high-precision remote sensing applications.