No Arabic abstract
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in single image super-resolution (SISR). The computing and memory requirements of these methods have hindered their application to broad classes of real devices with limited computing power, however. One approach to this problem has been lightweight network architectures that bal- ance the super-resolution performance and the computation burden. In this study, we revisit this problem from an orthog- onal view, and propose a novel learning strategy to maxi- mize the pixel-wise fitting capacity of a given lightweight network architecture. Considering that the initial capacity of the lightweight network is very limited, we present an adaptive importance learning scheme for SISR that trains the network with an easy-to-complex paradigm by dynam- ically updating the importance of image pixels on the basis of the training loss. Specifically, we formulate the network training and the importance learning into a joint optimization problem. With a carefully designed importance penalty function, the importance of individual pixels can be gradu- ally increased through solving a convex optimization problem. The training process thus begins with pixels that are easy to reconstruct, and gradually proceeds to more complex pixels as fitting improves.
Single image super-resolution(SISR) has witnessed great progress as convolutional neural network(CNN) gets deeper and wider. However, enormous parameters hinder its application to real world problems. In this letter, We propose a lightweight feature fusion network (LFFN) that can fully explore multi-scale contextual information and greatly reduce network parameters while maximizing SISR results. LFFN is built on spindle blocks and a softmax feature fusion module (SFFM). Specifically, a spindle block is composed of a dimension extension unit, a feature exploration unit and a feature refinement unit. The dimension extension layer expands low dimension to high dimension and implicitly learns the feature maps which is suitable for the next unit. The feature exploration unit performs linear and nonlinear feature exploration aimed at different feature maps. The feature refinement layer is used to fuse and refine features. SFFM fuses the features from different modules in a self-adaptive learning manner with softmax function, making full use of hierarchical information with a small amount of parameter cost. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments on benchmark datasets show that LFFN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods with similar parameters.
Despite convolutional network-based methods have boosted the performance of single image super-resolution (SISR), the huge computation costs restrict their practical applicability. In this paper, we develop a computation efficient yet accurate network based on the proposed attentive auxiliary features (A$^2$F) for SISR. Firstly, to explore the features from the bottom layers, the auxiliary feature from all the previous layers are projected into a common space. Then, to better utilize these projected auxiliary features and filter the redundant information, the channel attention is employed to select the most important common feature based on current layer feature. We incorporate these two modules into a block and implement it with a lightweight network. Experimental results on large-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model against the state-of-the-art (SOTA) SR methods. Notably, when parameters are less than 320k, A$^2$F outperforms SOTA methods for all scales, which proves its ability to better utilize the auxiliary features. Codes are available at https://github.com/wxxxxxxh/A2F-SR.
Deep convolutional networks have attracted great attention in image restoration and enhancement. Generally, restoration quality has been improved by building more and more convolutional block. However, these methods mostly learn a specific model to handle all images and ignore difficulty diversity. In other words, an area in the image with high frequency tend to lose more information during compressing while an area with low frequency tends to lose less. In this article, we adrress the efficiency issue in image SR by incorporating a patch-wise rolling network(PRN) to content-adaptively recover images according to difficulty levels. In contrast to existing studies that ignore difficulty diversity, we adopt different stage of a neural network to perform image restoration. In addition, we propose a rolling strategy that utilizes the parameters of each stage more flexible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only shows a significant acceleration but also maintain state-of-the-art performance.
Recent years have witnessed great success of convolutional neural network (CNN) for various problems both in low and high level visions. Especially noteworthy is the residual network which was originally proposed to handle high-level vision problems and enjoys several merits. This paper aims to extend the merits of residual network, such as skip connection induced fast training, for a typical low-level vision problem, i.e., single image super-resolution. In general, the two main challenges of existing deep CNN for supper-resolution lie in the gradient exploding/vanishing problem and large numbers of parameters or computational cost as CNN goes deeper. Correspondingly, the skip connections or identity mapping shortcuts are utilized to avoid gradient exploding/vanishing problem. In addition, the skip connections have naturally centered the activation which led to better performance. To tackle with the second problem, a lightweight CNN architecture which has carefully designed width, depth and skip connections was proposed. In particular, a strategy of gradually varying the shape of network has been proposed for residual network. Different residual architectures for image super-resolution have also been compared. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed CNN model can not only achieve state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM results for single image super-resolution but also produce visually pleasant results. This paper has extended the mmm 2017 oral conference paper with a considerable new analyses and more experiments especially from the perspective of centering activations and ensemble behaviors of residual network.
Recently, deep learning based single image super-resolution(SR) approaches have achieved great development. The state-of-the-art SR methods usually adopt a feed-forward pipeline to establish a non-linear mapping between low-res(LR) and high-res(HR) images. However, due to treating all image regions equally without considering the difficulty diversity, these approaches meet an upper bound for optimization. To address this issue, we propose a novel SR approach that discriminately processes each image region within an image by its difficulty. Specifically, we propose a dual-way SR network that one way is trained to focus on easy image regions and another is trained to handle hard image regions. To identify whether a region is easy or hard, we propose a novel image difficulty recognition network based on PSNR prior. Our SR approach that uses the region mask to adaptively enforce the dual-way SR network yields superior results. Extensive experiments on several standard benchmarks (e.g., Set5, Set14, BSD100, and Urban100) show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.