Knowledge Distillation for Optical Flow-Based Video Super-resolution

Recently, deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) models have been used to improve SR performance by equipping preprocessing networks with baseline SR networks. In particular, in video SR, which creates a high-resolution (HR) image with multiple frames, optical flow extraction is accompanied by a preprocessing process. These preprocessing networks work effectively in terms of quality, but at the cost of increased network parameters, which increase the computational complexity and memory consumption for SR tasks with restricted resources. One well-known approach is the knowledge distillation (KD) method, which can transfer the original model’s knowledge to a lightweight model with less performance degradation. Moreover, KD may improve SR quality with reduced model parameters. In this study, we propose an effective KD method that can effectively reduce the original SR model parameters and even improve network performance. The experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved a better PSNR than the original state-of-the-art SR network despite having fewer parameters.