Adversarial Multi-Path Residual Network for Image Super-Resolution.

Abstract

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have demonstrated remarkable progresses on single image super-resolution (SR) problem. However, most of them use more deeper and wider networks to improve SR performance, which is not practical in real-world applications due to large complexity, high computation cost, and low efficiency. In addition, they cannot provide high perception quality and guarantee objective quality simultaneously. To address these limitations, we in this paper propose a novel Adversarial Multipath Residual Network (AMPRN), which can largely suppress the number of network parameters and achieve a higher SR performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. More specifically, we propose a multi-path residual block (MPRB) for multi-path residual network (MPRN) with fewer network parameters, which can extract abundant local features by fully using features from different paths generated by channel slices. These hierarchical features from all the MPRBs are then jointly aggregated by global gradual feature fusion. Following MPRN, we construct an adversarial gradient network with a gradient loss to make the gradient distribution of the generated SR images and ground truth image closer. In this way, the generated SR images of our model can provide high perception quality and objective quality. Finally, several experimental results demonstrate that our AMPRN achieves better performance in comparison with fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art methods.