Progressive Multi-Scale Residual Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Super-resolution is a classical issue in image restoration field. In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved significant success in super-resolution topic, which concentrate on different elaborate network designs to exploit the image features more effectively. However, most of the networks focus on increasing the depth or width for superior capacities with a large number of parameters, which cause a high computation complexity cost and seldom focus on the inherent correlation of different features. This paper proposes a progressive multi-scale residual network (PMRN) for single image super-resolution problem by sequentially exploiting features with restricted parameters. Specifically, we design a progressive multi-scale residual block (PMRB) to progressively explore the multi-scale features with different layer combinations, aiming to consider the correlations of different scales. The combinations for feature exploitation are defined in a recursive fashion for introducing the non-linearity and better feature representation with limited parameters. Furthermore, we investigate a joint channel-wise and pixel-wise attention mechanism for comprehensive correlation exploration, termed as CPA, which is utilized in PMRB by considering both scale and bias factors for features in parallel. Experimental results show that proposed PMRN recovers structural textures more effectively with superior PSNR/SSIM results than other lightweight works. The extension model PMRN+ with self-ensemble achieves competitive or better results than large networks with much fewer parameters and lower computation complexity.