Optical Flow for Intermediate Frame Interpolation of Multispectral Geostationary Satellite Data

Applications of satellite data in areas such as weather tracking and modeling, ecosystem monitoring, wildfire detection, and landcover change are heavily dependent on the trade-offs related to the spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions of the observations. For instance, geostationary weather tracking satellites are designed to take hemispherical snapshots many times throughout the day but sensor hardware limits data collection. In this work we tackle this limitation by developing a method for temporal upsampling of multi-spectral satellite imagery using optical flow video interpolation deep convolutional neural networks. The presented model, extends Super SloMo (SSM) from single optical flow estimates to multichannel where flows are computed per wavelength band. We apply this technique on up to 8 multispectral bands of GOES-R/Advanced Baseline Imager mesoscale dataset to temporally enhance full disk hemispheric snapshots from 15 minutes to 1 minute on the NASA Earth Exchange high-performance computing capabilities. Through experimentation, we show SSM greatly outperforms the linear interpolation baseline and that multichannel optical flows improves performance on GOES/ABI. Lastly, we discuss challenges and open questions related to temporal interpolation of multispectral geostationary satellite imagery.