Multi-scale feature selection network for lightweight image super-resolution.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

Recently, many super-resolution (SR) methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved superior performance by utilizing deep and heavy models, which may not be suitable for real-world low-budget devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel lightweight SR network called a multi-scale feature selection network (MFSN). As the basic building block of MFSN, the multi-scale feature selection block (MFSB) is presented to extract the rich multi-scale features from a coarse-to-fine receptive field level. For a better representation ability, a wide-activated residual unit is adopted in each branch of MFSB except the last one. In MFSB, the scale selection module (SSM) is designed to effectively fuse the features from two adjacent branches by adjusting receptive field sizes adaptively. Further, a comprehensive channel attention mechanism (CCAM) is integrated into SSM to learn the dynamic selection weight by considering the local and global inter-channel dependencies. Extensive experimental results illustrate that the proposed MFSN is superior to other lightweight methods.

Authors

  • Minghong Li
    School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410083, China; Key Laboratory of Industrial Intelligence and Systems (Central South University), Ministry of Education, Changsha, Hunan 410083, China. Electronic address: minghongli233@gmail.com.
  • Yuqian Zhao
    Center for Cancer Prevention Research, Sichuan Cancer Hospital & Institute, Sichuan Cancer Center, School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
  • Fan Zhang
    Department of Anesthesiology, Bishan Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China.
  • Biao Luo
  • Chunhua Yang
  • Weihua Gui
    School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha City, 410083, China.
  • Kan Chang
    School of Computer and Electronic Information, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi 530004, China; Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi 530004, China. Electronic address: changkan0@gmail.com.