No Arabic abstract
Single image super-resolution (SISR) deals with a fundamental problem of upsampling a low-resolution (LR) image to its high-resolution (HR) version. Last few years have witnessed impressive progress propelled by deep learning methods. However, one critical challenge faced by existing methods is to strike a sweet spot of deep model complexity and resulting SISR quality. This paper addresses this pain point by proposing a linearly-assembled pixel-adaptive regression network (LAPAR), which casts the direct LR to HR mapping learning into a linear coefficient regression task over a dictionary of multiple predefined filter bases. Such a parametric representation renders our model highly lightweight and easy to optimize while achieving state-of-the-art results on SISR benchmarks. Moreover, based on the same idea, LAPAR is extended to tackle other restoration tasks, e.g., image denoising and JPEG image deblocking, and again, yields strong performance. The code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Simple-SR.
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.
In this paper, an efficient super-resolution (SR) method based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, namely Gradual Upsampling Network (GUN). Recent CNN based SR methods often preliminarily magnify the low resolution (LR) input to high resolution (HR) and then reconstruct the HR input, or directly reconstruct the LR input and then recover the HR result at the last layer. The proposed GUN utilizes a gradual process instead of these two commonly used frameworks. The GUN consists of an input layer, multiple upsampling and convolutional layers, and an output layer. By means of the gradual process, the proposed network can simplify the direct SR problem to multistep easier upsampling tasks with very small magnification factor in each step. Furthermore, a gradual training strategy is presented for the GUN. In the proposed training process, an initial network can be easily trained with edge-like samples, and then the weights are gradually tuned with more complex samples. The GUN can recover fine and vivid results, and is easy to be trained. The experimental results on several image sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed 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.
A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.