Lightweight Bimodal Network for Single-Image Super-Resolution via Symmetric CNN and Recursive TransformerGuangwei Gao, Zhengxue Wang, Juncheng Li et al.
Single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved significant breakthroughs with the development of deep learning. However, these methods are difficult to be applied in real-world scenarios since they are inevitably accompanied by the problems of computational and memory costs caused by the complex operations. To solve this issue, we propose a Lightweight Bimodal Network (LBNet) for SISR. Specifically, an effective Symmetric CNN is designed for local feature extraction and coarse image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a Recursive Transformer to fully learn the long-term dependence of images thus the global information can be fully used to further refine texture details. Studies show that the hybrid of CNN and Transformer can build a more efficient model. Extensive experiments have proved that our LBNet achieves more prominent performance than other state-of-the-art methods with a relatively low computational cost and memory consumption. The code is available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/LBNet.
Efficient Image Super-Resolution with Feature Interaction Weighted Hybrid NetworkWenjie Li, Juncheng Li, Guangwei Gao et al.
Lightweight image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images using low computational costs. However, existing methods result in the loss of middle-layer features due to activation functions. To minimize the impact of intermediate feature loss on reconstruction quality, we propose a Feature Interaction Weighted Hybrid Network (FIWHN), which comprises a series of Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Block (WDIB) as the backbone. Every third WDIB forms a Feature Shuffle Weighted Group (FSWG) by applying mutual information shuffle and fusion. Moreover, to mitigate the negative effects of intermediate feature loss, we introduce Wide Residual Weighting units within WDIB. These units effectively fuse features of varying levels of detail through a Wide-residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) and a Self-Calibrating Fusion (SCF). To compensate for global feature deficiencies, we incorporate a Transformer and explore a novel architecture to combine CNN and Transformer. We show that our FIWHN achieves a favorable balance between performance and efficiency through extensive experiments on low-level and high-level tasks. Codes will be available at \url{https://github.com/IVIPLab/FIWHN}.
Cross-receptive Focused Inference Network for Lightweight Image Super-ResolutionWenjie Li, Juncheng Li, Guangwei Gao et al.
Recently, Transformer-based methods have shown impressive performance in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks due to the ability of global feature extraction. However, the capabilities of Transformers that need to incorporate contextual information to extract features dynamically are neglected. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight Cross-receptive Focused Inference Network (CFIN) that consists of a cascade of CT Blocks mixed with CNN and Transformer. Specifically, in the CT block, we first propose a CNN-based Cross-Scale Information Aggregation Module (CIAM) to enable the model to better focus on potentially helpful information to improve the efficiency of the Transformer phase. Then, we design a novel Cross-receptive Field Guided Transformer (CFGT) to enable the selection of contextual information required for reconstruction by using a modulated convolutional kernel that understands the current semantic information and exploits the information interaction within different self-attention. Extensive experiments have shown that our proposed CFIN can effectively reconstruct images using contextual information, and it can strike a good balance between computational cost and model performance as an efficient model. Source codes will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/CFIN.
Dual-domain Modulation Network for Lightweight Image Super-ResolutionWenjie Li, Heng Guo, Yuefeng Hou et al.
Lightweight image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images under limited computational costs. We find that existing frequency-based SR methods cannot balance the reconstruction of overall structures and high-frequency parts. Meanwhile, these methods are inefficient for handling frequency features and unsuitable for lightweight SR. In this paper, we show that introducing both wavelet and Fourier information allows our model to consider both high-frequency features and overall SR structure reconstruction while reducing costs. Specifically, we propose a Dual-domain Modulation Network that integrates both wavelet and Fourier information for enhanced frequency modeling. Unlike existing methods that rely on a single frequency representation, our design combines wavelet-domain modulation via a Wavelet-domain Modulation Transformer (WMT) with global Fourier supervision, enabling complementary spectral learning well-suited for lightweight SR. Experimental results show that our method achieves a comparable PSNR to SRFormer and MambaIR while with less than 50\% and 60\% of their FLOPs and achieving inference speeds 15.4x and 5.4x faster, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method on SR quality and lightweight. Code link: https://github.com/24wenjie-li/DMNet
NAFRSSR: a Lightweight Recursive Network for Efficient Stereo Image Super-ResolutionYihong Chen, Zhen Fan, Shuai Dong et al.
Stereo image super-resolution (SR) refers to the reconstruction of a high-resolution (HR) image from a pair of low-resolution (LR) images as typically captured by a dual-camera device. To enhance the quality of SR images, most previous studies focused on increasing the number and size of feature maps and introducing complex and computationally intensive structures, resulting in models with high computational complexity. Here, we propose a simple yet efficient stereo image SR model called NAFRSSR, which is modified from the previous state-of-the-art model NAFSSR by introducing recursive connections and lightweighting the constituent modules. Our NAFRSSR model is composed of nonlinear activation free and group convolution-based blocks (NAFGCBlocks) and depth-separated stereo cross attention modules (DSSCAMs). The NAFGCBlock improves feature extraction and reduces number of parameters by removing the simple channel attention mechanism from NAFBlock and using group convolution. The DSSCAM enhances feature fusion and reduces number of parameters by replacing 1x1 pointwise convolution in SCAM with weight-shared 3x3 depthwise convolution. Besides, we propose to incorporate trainable edge detection operator into NAFRSSR to further improve the model performance. Four variants of NAFRSSR with different sizes, namely, NAFRSSR-Mobile (NAFRSSR-M), NAFRSSR-Tiny (NAFRSSR-T), NAFRSSR-Super (NAFRSSR-S) and NAFRSSR-Base (NAFRSSR-B) are designed, and they all exhibit fewer parameters, higher PSNR/SSIM, and faster speed than the previous state-of-the-art models. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, NAFRSSR-M is the lightest (0.28M parameters) and fastest (50 ms inference time) model achieving an average PSNR/SSIM as high as 24.657 dB/0.7622 on the benchmark datasets. Codes and models will be released at https://github.com/JNUChenYiHong/NAFRSSR.
Feature Distillation Interaction Weighting Network for Lightweight Image Super-ResolutionGuangwei Gao, Wenjie Li, Juncheng Li et al.
Convolutional neural networks based single-image super-resolution (SISR) has made great progress in recent years. However, it is difficult to apply these methods to real-world scenarios due to the computational and memory cost. Meanwhile, how to take full advantage of the intermediate features under the constraints of limited parameters and calculations is also a huge challenge. To alleviate these issues, we propose a lightweight yet efficient Feature Distillation Interaction Weighted Network (FDIWN). Specifically, FDIWN utilizes a series of specially designed Feature Shuffle Weighted Groups (FSWG) as the backbone, and several novel mutual Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Blocks (WDIB) form an FSWG. In addition, Wide Identical Residual Weighting (WIRW) units and Wide Convolutional Residual Weighting (WCRW) units are introduced into WDIB for better feature distillation. Moreover, a Wide-Residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) framework and a Self-Calibration Fusion (SCF) unit are proposed to interact features with different scales more flexibly and efficiently.Extensive experiments show that our FDIWN is superior to other models to strike a good balance between model performance and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/FDIWN.
8.3CLFeb 19, 2025
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Temporal and Contextual Narratives in Image Sequences?Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song et al. · pku
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success across various visual-language tasks. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on single-image understanding, leaving the analysis of image sequences largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we introduce StripCipher, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate capabilities of LMMs to comprehend and reason over sequential images. StripCipher comprises a human-annotated dataset and three challenging subtasks: visual narrative comprehension, contextual frame prediction, and temporal narrative reordering. Our evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LMMs, including GPT-4o and Qwen2.5VL, reveals a significant performance gap compared to human capabilities, particularly in tasks that require reordering shuffled sequential images. For instance, GPT-4o achieves only 23.93% accuracy in the reordering subtask, which is 56.07% lower than human performance. Further quantitative analysis discuss several factors, such as input format of images, affecting the performance of LLMs in sequential understanding, underscoring the fundamental challenges that remain in the development of LMMs.