Single-image super-resolution via dynamic multi-task learning and multi-level mutual feature fusion

In recent years, deep neural networks have exhibited promising performance in the single-image super-resolution (SISR) task by designing complex network structures from the low-resolution (LR) images to the high-resolution (HR) images and learning the mapping function. However, the SISR task is a widely known ill-posed problem. Since it may map one LR image input to multiple HR images, there are always undesired structural distortions in the recovered SR images. We creatively propose a SISR network with dynamic multi-task learning and multi-level mutual feature fusion (DMMFSR), alleviating structural distortion problems while maintaining more edge structure. Specifically, we utilize a DML block (DMLB) to train low-frequency and high-frequency image information extraction networks so the two networks can mutually promote each other. In addition, we also use a multi-level mutual feature fusion block to fuse image and edge features at different levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DMMFSR. Meanwhile, our model achieves comparable peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity scores on multiple SR benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art SR methods. (C) 2023 SPIE and IS&T