Panpan Fang

Yuan Ma, Kewen Liu, Hongxia Xiong et al.

The presence of residual and dense neural networks which greatly promotes the development of image Super-Resolution(SR) have witnessed a lot of impressive results. Depending on our observation, although more layers and connections could always improve performance, the increase of model parameters is not conducive to launch application of SR algorithms. Furthermore, algorithms supervised by L1/L2 loss can achieve considerable performance on traditional metrics such as PSNR and SSIM, yet resulting in blurry and over-smoothed outputs without sufficient high-frequency details, namely low perceptual index(PI). Regarding the issues, this paper develops a perception-oriented single image SR algorithm via dual relativistic average generative adversarial networks. In the generator part, a novel residual channel attention block is proposed to recalibrate significance of specific channels, further increasing feature expression capabilities. Parameters of convolutional layers within each block are shared to expand receptive fields while maintain the amount of tunable parameters unchanged. The feature maps are subsampled using sub-pixel convolution to obtain reconstructed high-resolution images. The discriminator part consists of two relativistic average discriminators that work in pixel domain and feature domain, respectively, fully exploiting the prior that half of data in a mini-batch are fake. Different weighted combinations of perceptual loss and adversarial loss are utilized to supervise the generator to equilibrate perceptual quality and objective results. Experimental results and ablation studies show that our proposed algorithm can rival state-of-the-art SR algorithms, both perceptually(PI-minimization) and objectively(PSNR-maximization) with fewer parameters.

Kewen Liu, Yuan Ma, Hongxia Xiong et al.

During training phase, more connections (e.g. channel concatenation in last layer of DenseNet) means more occupied GPU memory and lower GPU utilization, requiring more training time. The increase of training time is also not conducive to launch application of SR algorithms. This's why we abandoned DenseNet as basic network. Futhermore, we abandoned this paper due to its limitation only applied on medical images. Please view our lastest work applied on general images at arXiv:1911.03464.

Kewen Liu, Yuan Ma, Hongxia Xiong et al.

In order to address the issue that medical image would suffer from severe blurring caused by the lack of high-frequency details in the process of image super-resolution reconstruction, a novel medical image super-resolution method based on dense neural network and blended attention mechanism is proposed. The proposed method adds blended attention blocks to dense neural network(DenseNet), so that the neural network can concentrate more attention to the regions and channels with sufficient high-frequency details. Batch normalization layers are removed to avoid loss of high-frequency texture details. Final obtained high resolution medical image are obtained using deconvolutional layers at the very end of the network as up-sampling operators. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an improvement of 0.05db to 11.25dB and 0.6% to 14.04% on the peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) metric and structural similarity index(SSIM) metric, respectively, compared with the mainstream image super-resolution methods. This work provides a new idea for theoretical studies of medical image super-resolution reconstruction.