Multi-scale fractal residual network for image super-resolution

Recent studies have shown that the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can improve the performance of single image super-resolution reconstruction (SISR) methods. However, the existing CNN-based SISR model ignores the multi-scale features and shallow and deep features of the image, resulting in relatively low image reconstruction performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new multi-scale fractal residual network (MSFRN) for image super-resolution. On the basis of residual learning, a multi-scale fractal residual block (MSFRB) is designed. This block uses convolution kernels of different sizes to extract image multi-scale features and uses multiple paths to extract and fuse image features of different depths. Then, the shallow features extracted at the shallow feature extraction stage and the local features output by all MSFRBs are used to perform global hierarchical feature fusion. Finally, through sub-pixel convolution, the fused global features are used to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images. The experimental results on the five standard benchmark datasets show that MSFRN improved subjective visual effects and objective image quality evaluation indicators, and is superior to other state-of-the-art SISR methods.