Global reasoning network for image super-resolution

Jiahui Zhang, Bin Zhou, Qingchang Tao, Deqiang Wang

TL;DR: A state-of-the-art model based on global reasoning for image super-resolution

Abstract: Recent image super-resolution(SR) studies leverage very deep convolutional neural networks and the rich hierarchical features they offered, which leads to better reconstruction performance than conventional methods. However, the small receptive fields in the up-sampling and reconstruction process of those models stop them to take full advantage of global contextual information. This causes problems for further performance improvement. In this paper, inspired by image reconstruction principles of human visual system, we propose an image super-resolution global reasoning network (SRGRN) to effectively learn the correlations between different regions of an image, through global reasoning. Specifically, we propose global reasoning up-sampling module (GRUM) and global reasoning reconstruction block (GRRB). They construct a graph model to perform relation reasoning on regions of low resolution (LR) images.They aim to reason the interactions between different regions in the up-sampling and reconstruction process and thus leverage more contextual information to generate accurate details. Our proposed SRGRN are more robust and can handle low resolution images that are corrupted by multiple types of degradation. Extensive experiments on different benchmark data-sets show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Also our model is lightweight and consumes less computing power, which makes it very suitable for real life deployment.

Keywords: Global reasoning network, upsampling module, graph model, image super-resolution