Progressive Multi-Scale Residual Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Multi-scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve significant success in single image super-resolution (SISR), which considers the comprehensive information from different receptive fields. However, recent multi-scale networks usually aim to build the hierarchical exploration with different sizes of filters, which lead to high computation complexity costs, and seldom focus on the inherent correlations among different scales. This paper converts the multi-scale exploration into a sequential manner, and proposes a progressive multi-scale residual network (PMRN) for SISR problem. Specifically, we devise a progressive multi-scale residual block (PMRB) to substitute the larger filters with small filter combinations, and gradually explore the hierarchical information. Furthermore, channel- and pixel-wise attention mechanism (CPA) is designed for finding the inherent correlations among image features with weighting and bias factors, which concentrates more on high-frequency information. Experimental results show that the proposed PMRN recovers structural textures more effectively with superior PSNR/SSIM results than other small networks. The extension model PMRN$^+$ with self-ensemble achieves competitive or better results than large networks with much fewer parameters and lower computation complexity.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Multi-scale residual hierarchical dense networks for single image super-resolution

Single image super-resolution is known to be an ill-posed problem, which has been studied for decades. With the developments of deep convolutional neural networks, the CNN-based single image super-resolution methods have greatly improved the quality of the generated high-resolution images. However, it is difficult for image super-resolution to make full use of the relationship between pixels in low-resolution images. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-scale residual hierarchical dense network, which tries to find the dependencies in multi-level and multi-scale features. Specially, we apply the atrous spatial pyramid pooling, which concatenates multiple atrous convolutions with different dilation rates, and design a residual hierarchical dense structure for single image super-resolution. The atrous-spatial pyramid-pooling module is used for learning the relationship of features at multiple scales; while the residual hierarchical dense structure, which consists of several hierarchical dense blocks with skip connections, aims to adaptively detect key information from multi-level features. Meanwhile, dense features from different groups are connected in a dense approach by hierarchical dense blocks, which can adequately extract local multi-level features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods. The super-resolution results on benchmark datasets of our method can be downloaded from https://github.com/Rainyfish/MS-RHDN, and the source code will be released upon acceptance of the paper

Scale-wise Convolution for Image Restoration

While scale-invariant modeling has substantially boosted the performance of visual recognition tasks, it remains largely under-explored in deep networks based image restoration. Naively applying those scale-invariant techniques (e.g. multi-scale testing, random-scale data augmentation) to image restoration tasks usually leads to inferior performance. In this paper, we show that properly modeling scale-invariance into neural networks can bring significant benefits to image restoration performance. Inspired from spatial-wise convolution for shift-invariance, "scale-wise convolution" is proposed to convolve across multiple scales for scale-invariance. In our scale-wise convolutional network (SCN), we first map the input image to the feature space and then build a feature pyramid representation via bi-linear down-scaling progressively. The feature pyramid is then passed to a residual network with scale-wise convolutions. The proposed scale-wise convolution learns to dynamically activate and aggregate features from different input scales in each residual building block, in order to exploit contextual information on multiple scales. In experiments, we compare the restoration accuracy and parameter efficiency among our model and many different variants of multi-scale neural networks. The proposed network with scale-wise convolution achieves superior performance in multiple image restoration tasks including image super-resolution, image denoising and image compression artifacts removal. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/ychfan/scn_srComment: AAAI 202

Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement

With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.Comment: Accepted for publication at ECCV 202