BDL: transformer-based super-resolution network for degraded underground coal mine images

Underground coal mine images often suffer from severe blurring and low-resolution degradation due to harsh lighting, dust, and machinery motion, which hinder accurate visual inspection and automated analysis. This study proposes a transformer-based super-resolution (SR) network that integrates local convolution with adaptive interaction mechanisms for effective local-global feature modeling. The network employs a hierarchical architecture consisting of shallow feature extraction, cascaded spatial and channel transformer blocks, and a reconstruction module. Each transformer block incorporates a bidirectional adaptive interaction module (BAIM) to fuse convolutional local features with transformer-based global representations through adaptive reweighting in both spatial and channel dimensions. A dual-group feedforward network (DGFN) decouples channel feature preservation from spatial information enhancement, while cross-group interactions ensure balanced channel modeling and spatial perception without information loss. Additionally, a local convolution block (LCB) with SE-based channel weighting is used to restore fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on both a dedicated coal mine dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) SR approaches. Specifically, for ×2 super-resolution, it achieves a PSNR/SSIM of 32.07/0.9688 on the coal mine dataset, improving over the previous best by 0.59 dB and 0.0036, respectively. For ×4 super-resolution, it attains 28.10/0.8836, surpassing the previous best by 0.24 dB and 0.0013. Similar improvements are observed on public datasets, confirming the method's effectiveness in both general and challenging industrial scenarios.

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Publication Details

Journal
Scientific Reports
Published
2026-04-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-48248-1
Primary Topic
Advanced Image Processing Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

BDL: transformer-based super-resolution network for degraded underground coal mine images

Xiang Cheng, Jinbo Qiu, Tao Hu
Scientific Reports
Advanced Image Processing Techniques
article

BDL: transformer-based super-resolution network for degraded underground coal mine images

Xiang Cheng, Jinbo Qiu, Tao Hu
article en

Abstract

Underground coal mine images often suffer from severe blurring and low-resolution degradation due to harsh lighting, dust, and machinery motion, which hinder accurate visual inspection and automated analysis. This study proposes a transformer-based super-resolution (SR) network that integrates local convolution with adaptive interaction mechanisms for effective local-global feature modeling. The network employs a hierarchical architecture consisting of shallow feature extraction, cascaded spatial and channel transformer blocks, and a reconstruction module. Each transformer block incorporates a bidirectional adaptive interaction module (BAIM) to fuse convolutional local features with transformer-based global representations through adaptive reweighting in both spatial and channel dimensions. A dual-group feedforward network (DGFN) decouples channel feature preservation from spatial information enhancement, while cross-group interactions ensure balanced channel modeling and spatial perception without information loss. Additionally, a local convolution block (LCB) with SE-based channel weighting is used to restore fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on both a dedicated coal mine dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) SR approaches. Specifically, for ×2 super-resolution, it achieves a PSNR/SSIM of 32.07/0.9688 on the coal mine dataset, improving over the previous best by 0.59 dB and 0.0036, respectively. For ×4 super-resolution, it attains 28.10/0.8836, surpassing the previous best by 0.24 dB and 0.0013. Similar improvements are observed on public datasets, confirming the method's effectiveness in both general and challenging industrial scenarios.

Scientific Reports
Wuhan University (CN), China Coal Technology and Engineering Group Corp (China) (CN), China Coal Research Institute (China) (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 9%
Advanced Image Processing Techniques
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