Closed-Loop Residual Attention Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent research on single image super-resolution (SISR) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the utilization of residual structures and attention mechanisms to utilize image features has demonstrated excellent performance. However, previous SISR techniques mainly integrated extracted image features within a deep or wide network architecture, ignoring the interaction between multiscale features and the diversity of features. At the same time, SISR is also a typical ill-posed problem in that it allows for several predictions for a given LR image. These problems limit the great learning ability of CNNs. To solve these problems, we propose a closed-loop residual attention network (CLRAN) to extract and interact with all the available diversity of features features efficiently and limit the space of possible function solutions. Specifically, we design an enhanced residual attention block (ERA) to extract features, and it dynamically assigns weight to the internal attention branches. The ERA combines multi-scale block (MSB) and enhanced attention mechanism (EAM) base on the residual module. The MSB adaptively detects multiscale image features of different scales by using different 3 x 3 convolution kernels. The EAM combines multi-spectral channel attention (MSCA) and spatial attention (SA). Therefore, the EAM extracts different frequency component information and spatial information to utilize the diversity features. Furthermore, we apply the progressive network architecture and learn an additional map for model monitoring, which forms a closed-loop with the mapping already learned by the LR to HR function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CLRAN outperforms the state-of-the-art SISR methods on public datasets for both x4 and x8, proving its accuracy and visual perception.