(Retracted) Super-resolution generative adversarial networks using autoencoder reduce dimension

Abstract

Generative adversarial network (GAN) has been widely applied to produce super-resolution (SR) image with real perception and texture details. In most existing SR approaches, the training objective typically measures a pixel-wise average distance between the SR and high-resolution (HR) images. However, as the degradation function of different images from HR to low resolution (LR) is generally different, optimizing such metrics often leads to certain unpleasant artificial traces. Unlike the prevalent GAN inversion methods that require expensive image-specific optimization at runtime, we present an alternative formulation by directly leveraging latent representation produced by a pretrained AutoEncoder. We call this improved method reduce dimension super-resolved GAN (RD-SRGAN). RD-SRGAN first obtains the latent feature representation of LR image by a pretrained AutoEncoder as input to the generator network. This process not only reduces noise effects but also decreases the overall computational complexity. On the other hand, the residual between the ground truth and the produced images replaces the produced images as input to the discriminator network, and a 2D zero mean Gaussian noise with controllable low variance replaces the real images as another input to the discriminator network. By leveraging the feature representation and properties of the 2D zero mean Gaussian noise, we restrict the optimization space to produce an SR image. Therefore, the residual of the generated SR images tend to approximates to a Gaussian noise, which introduces useless deviation information as little as possible. Experimental results show that RD-SRGAN can benefit from these strategies and achieve improved fidelity and naturalness comparison to existing methods. Switching the pretrained AutoEncoder allows the method to deal with images from diverse categories, e.g., remote sensing satellite imaging, medical imaging, and astronomy.