Fast image super-resolution algorithm based on multi-resolution dictionary learning and sparse representation

Sparse representation has attracted extensive attention and performed well on image super-resolution（SR） in the last decade. However, many current image SR methods face the contradiction of detail recovery and artifact suppression. We propose a multi-resolution dictionary learning（MRDL） model to solve this contradiction, and give a fast single image SR method based on the MRDL model. To obtain the MRDL model, we first extract multi-scale patches by using our proposed adaptive patch partition method（APPM）. The APPM divides images into patches of different sizes according to their detail richness. Then, the multiresolution dictionary pairs, which contain structural primitives of various resolutions, can be trained from these multi-scale patches.Owing to the MRDL strategy, our SR algorithm not only recovers details well, with less jag and noise, but also significantly improves the computational efficiency. Experimental results validate that our algorithm performs better than other SR methods in evaluation metrics and visual perception.

A brief survey on deep learning based image super-resolution

Image super-resolution(SR)is an important technique for improving the resolution and quality of images.With the great progress of deep learning,image super-resolution achieves remarkable improvements recently.In this work,a brief survey on recent advances of deep learning based single image super-resolution methods is systematically described.The existing studies of SR techniques are roughly grouped into ten major categories.Besides,some other important issues are also introduced,such as publicly available benchmark datasets and performance evaluation metrics.Finally,this survey is concluded by highlighting four future trends.

Channel attention based wavelet cascaded network for image super-resolution

Convolutional neural networks(CNNs) have shown great potential for image super-resolution(SR).However,most existing CNNs only reconstruct images in the spatial domain,resulting in insufficient high-frequency details of reconstructed images.To address this issue,a channel attention based wavelet cascaded network for image super-resolution(CWSR) is proposed.Specifically,a second-order channel attention(SOCA) mechanism is incorporated into the network,and the covariance matrix normalization is utilized to explore interdependencies between channel-wise features.Then,to boost the quality of residual features,the non-local module is adopted to further improve the global information integration ability of the network.Finally,taking the image loss in the spatial and wavelet domains into account,a dual-constrained loss function is proposed to optimize the network.Experimental results illustrate that CWSR outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics.

Contrastive Learning for Blind Super-Resolution via A Distortion-Specific Network

Previous deep learning-based super-resolution(SR)methods rely on the assumption that the degradation process is predefined(e.g.,bicubic downsampling).Thus,their performance would suffer from deterioration if the real degradation is not consistent with the assumption.To deal with real-world scenarios,existing blind SR methods are committed to estimating both the degradation and the super-resolved image with an extra loss or iterative scheme.However,degradation estimation that requires more computation would result in limited SR performance due to the accumulated estimation errors.In this paper,we propose a contrastive regularization built upon contrastive learning to exploit both the information of blurry images and clear images as negative and positive samples,respectively.Contrastive regularization ensures that the restored image is pulled closer to the clear image and pushed far away from the blurry image in the representation space.Furthermore,instead of estimating the degradation,we extract global statistical prior information to capture the character of the distortion.Considering the coupling between the degradation and the low-resolution image,we embed the global prior into the distortion-specific SR network to make our method adaptive to the changes of distortions.We term our distortion-specific network with contrastive regularization as CRDNet.The extensive experiments on synthetic and realworld scenes demonstrate that our lightweight CRDNet surpasses state-of-the-art blind super-resolution approaches.

RFCNet:Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution Using Residual Feature Calibration Network

In the field of single remote sensing image Super-Resolution(SR),deep Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs)have achieved top performance.To further enhance convolutional module performance in processing remote sensing images,we construct an efficient residual feature calibration block to generate expressive features.After harvesting residual features,we first divide them into two parts along the channel dimension.One part flows to the Self-Calibrated Convolution(SCC)to be further refined,and the other part is rescaled by the proposed Two-Path Channel Attention(TPCA)mechanism.SCC corrects local features according to their expressions under the deep receptive field,so that the features can be refined without increasing the number of calculations.The proposed TPCA uses the means and variances of feature maps to obtain accurate channel attention vectors.Moreover,a region-level nonlocal operation is introduced to capture long-distance spatial contextual information by exploring pixel dependencies at the region level.Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed residual feature calibration network is superior to other SR methods in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Edge preserving super-resolution infrared image reconstruction based on L1-and L2-norms

Super-resolution （SR） is a widely used tech- nology that increases image resolution using algorithmic methods. However, preserving the local edge structure and visual quality in infrared （IR） SR images is challenging because of their disadvantages, such as lack of detail, poor contrast, and blurry edges. Traditional and advanced methods maintain the quantitative measures, but they mostly fail to preserve edge and visual quality. This paper proposes an algorithm based on high frequency layer features. This algorithm focuses on the IR image edge texture in the reconstruction process. Experimental results show that the mean gradient of the IR image reconstructed by the proposed algorithm increased by 1.5, 1.4, and 1.2 times than that of the traditional algorithm based on L1- norm, L2-norm, and traditional mixed norm, respectively. The peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index, and visual effect of the reconstructed image also improved.

Super-resolution reconstruction of astronomical images using time-scale adaptive normalized convolution

In this work, we describe a new multiframe Super-Resolution（SR） framework based on time-scale adaptive Normalized Convolution（NC）, and apply it to astronomical images. The method mainly uses the conceptual basis of NC where each neighborhood of a signal is expressed in terms of the corresponding subspace expanded by the chosen polynomial basis function. Instead of the conventional NC, the introduced spatially adaptive filtering kernel is utilized as the applicability function of shape-adaptive NC, which fits the local image structure information including shape and orientation. This makes it possible to obtain image patches with the same modality,which are collected for polynomial expansion to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio and suppress aliasing artifacts across lines and edges. The robust signal certainty takes the confidence value at each point into account before a local polynomial expansion to minimize the influence of outliers.Finally, the temporal scale applicability is considered to omit accurate motion estimation since it is easy to result in annoying registration errors in real astronomical applications. Excellent SR reconstruction capability of the time-scale adaptive NC is demonstrated through fundamental experiments on both synthetic images and real astronomical images when compared with other SR reconstruction methods.

基于稀疏编码的视频序列超分辨率重构

把学习型算法用于稀疏编码的重建算法中来实现视频序列图像的超分辨率重构。该算法无需显式求取运动向量,能够克服传统方法对精确运动估计的要求,通过稀疏编码便能够自动利用邻近帧中最相关的那些样本块进行重构;另外,算法通过设置最大运动窗口,利用帧间运动的连续性特点,在相邻帧已经重建的基础上,提取其运动窗口内的高、低分辨率图像块来构建样本库,从而实现减小所需样本库的尺寸的目的。