Single Image Super-Resolution Method Based on an Improved Adversarial Generation Network

Abstract

Super-Resolution (SR) techniques for image restoration have recently been gaining attention due to their excellent performance. For powerful learning abilities, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been proven to have achieved great success. In this paper, we propose an Enhanced Generative Adversarial Network (EGAN) for improving its effects for a real-time Super-Resolution task. The main content of this paper are as follows: (1) We adopted the Laplacian pyramid framework as a pre-trained module, which is beneficial for providing multiscale features for our input. (2) At each feature block, a convolutional skip-connections network, which may contain some latent information, was significant for the generative model to reconstruct a plausible-looking image. (3) Considering that the edge details usually play an important role in image generation, a perceptual loss function was defined to train and seek the optimal parameters. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations were demonstrated so that our algorithm not only took full advantage of the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to improve the image quality, but also performed better than other algorithms in speed and performance for real-time Super-Resolution tasks.