Lightweight adaptive weighted network for single image super-resolution

Deep learning has been successfully applied to the single-image super-resolution (SISR) task with superior performance in recent years. However, most convolutional neural network (CNN) based SR models have a large number of parameters to be optimized, which requires heavy computation and thereby limits their real world applications. In this work, a novel lightweight SR network, named Adaptive Weighted Super-Resolution Network (LW-AWSRN), is proposed to address this issue. A novel local fusion block (LFB) is developed in LW-AWSRN for efficient residual learning, which consists of several stacked adaptive weighted residual units (AWRU) and a local residual fusion unit (LRFU). Moreover, an adaptive weighted multi-scale (AWMS) module is proposed to make full use of features for the reconstruction of HR images. The AWMS module includes several convolutions with multiple scales, and the redundancy scale branch can be removed according to the contribution of adaptive weights for the lightweight network. The experimental results on the commonly used datasets show that the proposed LW-AWSRN achieves superior performance on x 2, x 3, x 4, and x 8 scale factors compared to state-of-the-art methods with similar parameters and computational overhead. It suggests that LW-AWSRN has a better trade-off between reconstruction quality and model size.