Image super-resolution via deep dilated convolutional networks

Abstract

Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in single image super-resolution (SR). Recently, researches have shown that increasing the depth of network can significantly improve SR performance. Very deep networks for SR achieved a large improvement than former methods. However, simply increasing depths basically introduce more parameters and this lead to cumbersome computational cost. In this paper, we present a general and effective method to accelerate very deep networks for single image SR. Our method is based on dilated convolution operation, which support exponential expansion of the receptive field without increasing filter size. With the help of dilated convolution, shallow networks can achieve large receptive field and exploit contextual information in an efficient way. Based on a very deep network, we propose a 12 layers dilated convolutional network for SR (DCNSR). While accelerating 2x speed, our shallow network achieves better performance than original deep networks and shows state-of-the-art reconstructed results.