When traditional super-resolution reconstruction methods are applied to infrared thermal images, they often ignore the problem of poor image quality caused by the imaging mechanism, which makes it difficult to obtain high-quality reconstruction results even with the training of simulated degraded inverse processes. To address these issues, we proposed a thermal infrared image super-resolution reconstruction method based on multimodal sensor fusion, aiming to enhance the resolution of thermal infrared images and rely on multimodal sensor information to reconstruct high-frequency details in the images, thereby overcoming the limitations of imaging mechanisms. First, we designed a novel super-resolution reconstruction network, which consisted of primary feature encoding, super-resolution reconstruction, and high-frequency detail fusion subnetwork, to enhance the resolution of thermal infrared images and rely on multimodal sensor information to reconstruct high-frequency details in the images, thereby overcoming limitations of imaging mechanisms. We designed hierarchical dilated distillation modules and a cross-attention transformation module to extract and transmit image features, enhancing the network's ability to express complex patterns. Then, we proposed a hybrid loss function to guide the network in extracting salient features from thermal infrared images and reference images while maintaining accurate thermal information. Finally, we proposed a learning strategy to ensure the high-quality super-resolution reconstruction performance of the network, even in the absence of reference images. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits superior reconstruction image quality compared to other contrastive methods, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Keywords: information fusion; multimodal sensors; super-resolution reconstruction; thermal infrared imaging.