Lightweight Image Super-Resolution via Weighted Multi-Scale Residual Network

摘要

The tradeoff between efficiency and model size of the convolutional neural network(CNN)is an essential issue for applications of CNN-based algorithms to diverse real-world tasks.Although deep learning-based methods have achieved significant improvements in image super-resolution(SR),current CNNbased techniques mainly contain massive parameters and a high computational complexity,limiting their practical applications.In this paper,we present a fast and lightweight framework,named weighted multi-scale residual network(WMRN),for a better tradeoff between SR performance and computational efficiency.With the modified residual structure,depthwise separable convolutions(DS Convs)are employed to improve convolutional operations’efficiency.Furthermore,several weighted multi-scale residual blocks(WMRBs)are stacked to enhance the multi-scale representation capability.In the reconstruction subnetwork,a group of Conv layers are introduced to filter feature maps to reconstruct the final high-quality image.Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed model,and the comparative results with several state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of WMRN.