Accurate Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) mapping at both large scale and high spatio-temporal resolution is essential for applications ranging from climate modeling to biodiversity assessment, and sustainable supply chain monitoring. At present, fine-grained AGB mapping relies on costly airborne laser scanning acquisition campaigns usually limited to regional scales. Initiatives such as the ESA CCI map attempt to generate global biomass products from diverse spaceborne sensors but at a coarser resolution. To enable global, high-resolution (HR) mapping, several works propose to regress AGB from HR satellite observations such as ESA Sentinel-1/2 images. We propose a novel way to address HR AGB estimation, by leveraging both HR satellite observations and existing low-resolution (LR) biomass products. We cast this problem as Guided Super-Resolution (GSR), aiming at upsampling LR biomass maps (sources) from 100 to 10 m resolution, using auxiliary HR co-registered satellite images (guides). We compare super-resolving AGB maps with and without guidance, against direct regression from satellite images, on the public BioMassters dataset. We observe that Multi-Scale Guidance (MSG) outperforms direct regression both for regression (−780 t/ha RMSE) and perception (+2.0 dB PSNR) metrics, and better captures high-biomass values, without significant computational overhead. Interestingly, unlike the RGB+Depth setting they were originally designed for, our best-performing AGB GSR approaches are those that most preserve the guide image texture. Our results make a strong case for adopting the GSR framework for accurate HR biomass mapping at scale.
Karaman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.