MFFN: Multi‐path feedback fusion network for lightweight image super resolution

Abstract

AbstractRecently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown great power in single image super resolution (SISR) reconstruction, and achieving significant improvements over traditional methods. Despite the great success of these CNN‐based methods, direct application of these methods to some edge devices is impractical due to the large computational overhead required. To address this problem, a novel, lightweight SISR network focusing on speed and accuracy, called the multi‐path feedback fusion network (MFFN), has been designed in this paper. Specifically, in order to extract features more effectively, the authors propose a novel fusion attention feedback block (FAFB) as the main building block of MFFN. The FAFB consists of a backbone branch and several hierarchical branches. The backbone branch is composed of stacked enhanced pixel attentional blocks (EPAB), which are responsible for incremental deep feature learning on the feature map. And the hierarchical branches are responsible for extracting feature maps with different sizes of receptive fields and fusing these feature maps with the features extracted from the trunk branches to achieve multi‐scale feature learning, which the authors refer to this design as the multi‐scale fusion block (MSFB). Extra enhancement information (EIE) is added to each EPAB input, which enables the backbone branch to learn more effectively. On the other hand, the outputs of the cascade branches are further complemented by an additional feedback fusion enhancement block (FFEB) before being fused with the output of the trunk branches to achieve more comprehensive and accurate feature learning. Numerous experiments have shown that MFFN achieves higher accuracy than other state‐of‐the‐art methods on benchmark test sets.