Lightweight image super-resolution with enhanced CNN
This addresses the challenge of applying super-resolution to resource-constrained devices, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing CNN architectures.
The paper tackles the problem of high computational cost and memory usage in deep CNNs for single image super-resolution by proposing a lightweight enhanced SR CNN (LESRCNN) with three sub-blocks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with strong expressive ability have achieved impressive performances on single image super-resolution (SISR). However, their excessive amounts of convolutions and parameters usually consume high computational cost and more memory storage for training a SR model, which limits their applications to SR with resource-constrained devices in real world. To resolve these problems, we propose a lightweight enhanced SR CNN (LESRCNN) with three successive sub-blocks, an information extraction and enhancement block (IEEB), a reconstruction block (RB) and an information refinement block (IRB). Specifically, the IEEB extracts hierarchical low-resolution (LR) features and aggregates the obtained features step-by-step to increase the memory ability of the shallow layers on deep layers for SISR. To remove redundant information obtained, a heterogeneous architecture is adopted in the IEEB. After that, the RB converts low-frequency features into high-frequency features by fusing global and local features, which is complementary with the IEEB in tackling the long-term dependency problem. Finally, the IRB uses coarse high-frequency features from the RB to learn more accurate SR features and construct a SR image. The proposed LESRCNN can obtain a high-quality image by a model for different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LESRCNN outperforms state-of-the-arts on SISR in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The code of LESRCNN is accessible on https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/LESRCNN.