Fast Adaptation to Super-Resolution Networks via Meta-Learning
This work addresses the need for efficient and effective SR adaptation for image processing applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing SR networks without architectural changes.
The paper tackles the problem of super-resolution (SR) networks failing to exploit test image properties by proposing a meta-learning approach that allows networks to quickly adapt to input images at test time, improving performance on various benchmark datasets.
Conventional supervised super-resolution (SR) approaches are trained with massive external SR datasets but fail to exploit desirable properties of the given test image. On the other hand, self-supervised SR approaches utilize the internal information within a test image but suffer from computational complexity in run-time. In this work, we observe the opportunity for further improvement of the performance of SISR without changing the architecture of conventional SR networks by practically exploiting additional information given from the input image. In the training stage, we train the network via meta-learning; thus, the network can quickly adapt to any input image at test time. Then, in the test stage, parameters of this meta-learned network are rapidly fine-tuned with only a few iterations by only using the given low-resolution image. The adaptation at the test time takes full advantage of patch-recurrence property observed in natural images. Our method effectively handles unknown SR kernels and can be applied to any existing model. We demonstrate that the proposed model-agnostic approach consistently improves the performance of conventional SR networks on various benchmark SR datasets.