Image-specific Convolutional Kernel Modulation for Single Image Super-resolution
This work addresses the need for adaptive models in super-resolution for image processing applications, offering an incremental improvement by embedding into existing architectures without additional parameters.
The paper tackles the problem of single image super-resolution by proposing an image-specific convolutional kernel modulation (IKM) method that adaptively modulates kernels using global contextual information, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in extensive experiments.
Recently, deep-learning-based super-resolution methods have achieved excellent performances, but mainly focus on training a single generalized deep network by feeding numerous samples. Yet intuitively, each image has its representation, and is expected to acquire an adaptive model. For this issue, we propose a novel image-specific convolutional kernel modulation (IKM) by exploiting the global contextual information of image or feature to generate an attention weight for adaptively modulating the convolutional kernels, which outperforms the vanilla convolution and several existing attention mechanisms while embedding into the state-of-the-art architectures without any additional parameters. Particularly, to optimize our IKM in mini-batch training, we introduce an image-specific optimization (IsO) algorithm, which is more effective than the conventional mini-batch SGD optimization. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of IKM on the state-of-the-art architectures and exploit a new backbone with U-style residual learning and hourglass dense block learning, terms U-Hourglass Dense Network (U-HDN), which is an appropriate architecture to utmost improve the effectiveness of IKM theoretically and experimentally. Extensive experiments on single image super-resolution show that the proposed methods achieve superior performances over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at github.com/YuanfeiHuang/IKM.