NSSR-DIL: Null-Shot Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning
This addresses the computational and time complexity issues in real-world image super-resolution applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised methods.
The paper tackles the problem of image super-resolution by proposing a computationally efficient algorithm that avoids reliance on large datasets, achieving competitive performance on benchmarks while reducing computational resources by at least an order of 10.
The present State-of-the-Art (SotA) Image Super-Resolution (ISR) methods employ Deep Learning (DL) techniques using a large amount of image data. The primary limitation to extending the existing SotA ISR works for real-world instances is their computational and time complexities. In this paper, contrary to the existing methods, we present a novel and computationally efficient ISR algorithm that is independent of the image dataset to learn the ISR task. The proposed algorithm reformulates the ISR task from generating the Super-Resolved (SR) images to computing the inverse of the kernels that span the degradation space. We introduce Deep Identity Learning, exploiting the identity relation between the degradation and inverse degradation models. The proposed approach neither relies on the ISR dataset nor on a single input low-resolution (LR) image (like the self-supervised method i.e. ZSSR) to model the ISR task. Hence we term our model as Null-Shot Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning (NSSR-DIL). The proposed NSSR-DIL model requires fewer computational resources, at least by an order of 10, and demonstrates a competitive performance on benchmark ISR datasets. Another salient aspect of our proposition is that the NSSR-DIL framework detours retraining the model and remains the same for varying scale factors like X2, X3, and X4. This makes our highly efficient ISR model more suitable for real-world applications.