Cascaded Dense-UNet for Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in single image super-resolution (SISR). Especially, dense skip connections and residual learning structures promote better performance. While most existing deep CNN-based networks exploit the interpolation of upsampled original images, or do transposed convolution in the reconstruction stage, which do not fully employ the hierarchical features of the networks for final reconstruction. In this paper, we present a novel cascaded Dense-UNet (CDU) structure to take full advantage of all hierarchical features for SISR. In each Dense-UNet block (DUB), many short, dense skip pathways can facilitate the flow of information and integrate the different receptive fields. A series of DUBs are concatenated to acquire high-resolution features and capture complementary contextual information. Upsampling operators are in DUBs. Furthermore, residual learning is introduced to our network, which can fuse shallow features from low resolution (LR) image and deep features from cascaded DUBs to further boost super-resolution (SR) reconstruction results. The proposed method is evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively on four benchmark datasets, our network achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art super-resolution approaches and obtains pleasant visualization results.