  Hyperspectral Imaging is a crucial tool in remote sensing which captures far
more spectral information than standard color images. However, the increase in
spectral information comes at the cost of spatial resolution. Super-resolution
is a popular technique where the goal is to generate a high-resolution version
of a given low-resolution input. The majority of modern super-resolution
approaches use convolutional neural networks. However, convolution itself is a
linear operation and the networks rely on the non-linear activation functions
after each layer to provide the necessary non-linearity to learn the complex
underlying function. This means that convolutional neural networks tend to be
very deep to achieve the desired results. Recently, self-organized operational
neural networks have been proposed that aim to overcome this limitation by
replacing the convolutional filters with learnable non-linear functions through
the use of MacLaurin series expansions. This work focuses on extending the
convolutional filters of a popular super-resolution model to more powerful
operational filters to enhance the model performance on hyperspectral images.
We also investigate the effects that residual connections and different
normalization types have on this type of enhanced network. Despite having fewer
parameters than their convolutional network equivalents, our results show that
operational neural networks achieve superior super-resolution performance on
small hyperspectral image datasets. Our code is made available on Github:
https://github.com/aulrichsen/SRONN.
